Recycling of batteries is not the solution – neither is it the problem

An editorial published in Nature today states that batteries needs to be more ethical and greener. That's absolutely true. But if batteries need to be greener so do jewelry, electronics, household appliances – and everything made of oil.

Recycling is one part of the solution. But it's literally only the last resort for the batteries. Nature captures that well. The article echoes many points I've conveyed over the years: LIBs have long lives, they travel with their devices (incl cars) and are recycled where there's a need for recycled materials. Although LIB production is on rise in Europe the main capacity will for years be in Asia.

"batteries are often built into the devices they power and are hard to dismantle, or the devices themselves are valuable, which means they are likely to be exported for resale and disappear from the EU unreported"

Nature, 29 June 2021

By not acknowledging those points (which I think haven't been done neither in the EU nor in the US) detailed regulations of battery recycling and recycled materials will fail.

Doing so, recycling might continue to be something that takes place far from us even in the future. Except for lost job opportunities that might not be a disaster. After all we have been relying on Asia to recycle a lot of the scrap we produce and that way the materials have re-entered the supply chains many times in a better way than if it would have been processed in Europe.

"There’s already a shortage of recycled material. So, to satisfy the new recycling rules, Europe’s manufacturers could, perversely, need to import recycled material, in particular from China — which, along with South Korea, has become an important global centre for battery recycling."

Nature, 29 June 2021

Instead the worst part is that all buzz around recycling seem to distract us from what's more important – how we sustainably mine more materials so we can decarbonize the world.

Anyone who knows only a little about circular economy understands that it starts with the function of a product. Thus EVs are not the solution. Fixing how transportation is done is. Or the actual need to move around at all. But to fully eliminate our need for transports is basically impossible.

There are around 1 billion cars in use today in the world. Only 10 million of them are electric. And that's only cars. Add buses, trucks, ships, ferries and air crafts to that. Even with a radical change in our ride habits there is an enormous fleet to electrify, like it or not.

Of the 10M EVs more than 50% were placed on the market the last 2 years. That recycling of the LIBs in those would make an important contribution in the near future is absurd. That's not to say that recycling isn't important or without potential. Just that mining is more important.

Likewise, the idea that inefficient recycling would create a waste problem is falsified by the situation described above. We desperately need those materials. To a large extent they are recycled today. With increased volume they will be recycled even more efficiently in the future.

Still, unfortunately neither recycling, nor mining in Europe does a lot to fix poverty in deprived countries. I think it's time to realize that if we really care, we have to deal with that in tandem, not as it would be a consequence of our efforts to fix the environment.