Batteries in a cycle: sustainability, resilience and profitability

The first players in a circular economy for battery technology have positioned themselves, one of them being EAS Batteries. With the Battery Circularity project of the CIRCULAR REPUBLIC initiative of the Munich-based start-up centre UnternehmerTUM, a so-called ‘proof of concept’ shows that a completely closed lithium cycle for battery active materials is on the verge of being feasible. Dr Matthias Ballweg, organiser of the CIRCULAR REPUBLIC initiative, answered four questions about the challenges and opportunities of the growing circular economy for batteries:

How do you experience the move into the circular economy of battery technology?
„Every company involved with automotive batteries is now addressing the issue of recycling at the board level. This is new and it's great. Innovations and scaling have been pushed for about a year. But we are slow. Some areas, such as disassembly, have been neglected so far. Batteries are still taken apart manually rather than automatically with the help of cobots. This is because this has not yet been a business case in its own right. Companies are still investing in recycling for compliance reasons, not because it would currently pay off in Europe. At the same time I am also encountering promising new processes, such as hydrometallurgy. In contrast to the conventional pyrometallurgical process, the hydrometallurgical processing of the black mass can recover not only cobalt and nickel from the shredded batteries, but also the lithium. However, a method for the fine processing of the recovered lithium is still lacking. We are currently looking for this in our battery cycle project from CIRCULAR REPUBLIC, which we have set up together with EAS, among others. We are working on the blind spots – and on scaling the then complete battery cycle to industrial sizes.“

What is currently changing and driving the battery industry towards recycling?
„The economy is increasingly realising that the issue has several dimensions. It's not just about protecting the planet and blasting less lithium out of the ground. Rather, recycled lithium has geostrategic relevance. We have to make our economy less dependent on resource flows from third countries, otherwise we will soon be in the same situation with battery materials as we are with Russian gas. The energy transition is increasing the geopolitical relevance of batteries. Unlike in the past, we would be hit hard if the flow of so-called ‘clean energy materials’ dried up. It is already a lifeline for Europe. In addition, the electrification of street traffic in particular is boosting the recycling market. The core driver here is certainly the EU regulatory requirement that from 2031 at least six percent of the lithium used in a new battery must be recycled. To do that, we have to have sold the electric cars whose batteries we can recycle at least ten years before we want to use the recycled lithium. Given the steep increase in demand for electric cars, six per cent secondary lithium is a large amount, which we will only achieve with extraordinary effort based on the number of batteries currently in use and the fact that the circular economy is not yet fully closed from a technological point of view.“

What are the chances for a profitable battery cycle by 2031?
„Recycling is always profitable for someone, otherwise no one would have bothered with it up to now. An economically profitable battery cycle is also conceivable – but it depends on its scaling. It is also unclear which technologies will determine the future battery cycle. Batteries are a complex product. An enormous amount of process knowledge lies in their production in terms of repetitive quality. However, we don't yet have decades of well-rehearsed processes that only need to be optimised. The uncertainty of the recycled material comes right in the middle of the ongoing professionalisation phase. We don't yet have long-term stress tests on the road, but at the same time we need to have changed our formulas again in six years at the latest. Flexibility is needed here. No recycled material is one hundred per cent pure. The question is how do we deal with it and what degree of contamination can we allow. Perhaps, above a certain level, the purity of the lithium no longer makes a difference to the durability or range of the battery, but it saves energy and processes in the purification. I am absolutely certain that we will see a profitable battery cycle in time for the necessary regulation in 2031. A highly exciting question is what compromises we will have to make in it and whether it will be profitable without a massive price increase.“

How sustainable will the circular battery economy be?
„A functioning circular economy involves reducing the use of resources and reusing products in a second life cycle. Recycling is always just the last step. If we rely on market forces for the reuse or recycling of our resources, we can ensure that economically successful action is also environmentally friendly. In the battery industry, we are currently in the midst of a hectic race to catch up in order to implement recycling on an industrial scale, but basically we already have the technological knowledge to permanently return our materials to a cycle. The advantage of battery materials is that they are essentially metals. Unlike textiles or plastics, they can be endlessly replicated and recycled. But the formulations of battery chemistry itself will also change. For certain applications, iron phosphate batteries will one day be able to function entirely without lithium. We will see many more sustainable innovations in this area.“