Using electrical vehicles to power homes during outages is hot news, and we could use them to recharge our phones too. Although we would need a very large number of phones before we could speak of powering electric vehicles. So is there no merit in the idea, or should we look further? ABC News believes the latter is the case. We had to know more!
Powering Electric Vehicles Relies on Minerals
North Americans have been spectacularly unsuccessful when it comes to recycling lithium batteries. In fact, on February 12, 2023 ABC News revealed the success rate with phone batteries is a low as 5%.
Unbelievably it says, this is because consumers had to historically bear the cost of shipping used devices to recycling centers. We can slice this insight into our culture any way we like. However the fact is, this is an untapped resource and we should redeploy it for powering electric vehicles.
Progress Through Technology: Recycling Lithium Batteries
But now a company called Redwood Materials has stepped into the gap, in partnership with a German automaker. They are equipping their branches to facilitate collection and recycling of all kinds of lithium-ion batteries.
All citizens need do now, is drop their used devices and batteries at their nearest participating branch. Officials there will ship them in batches to Redwood’s Nevada facilities. The receiving plant will extract their cobalt and lithium. These are the scarce, critical materials we need for powering electric vehicles.
The United States alone is “one of the largest consumers of lithium-ion batteries” a Redwood spokesperson told ABC News. If we recycle what we already have, she continued, we can “forcibly extract” less from Earth.
“Consumers are itching to get rid of these devices. There’s a tremendous opportunity for recycling.” Redwood Technology might be able to extract 95% of the nickel, cobalt, copper, aluminum, lithium and graphite in a lithium-ion battery. The only question to ask is, why it took so long to reach this point..
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