Electric vehicle specialists Elektrek published some interesting news about EV battery recycling on April 16, 2019. According to them, Tesla is developing a unique battery recycling system it plans to operate in-house. It had previously hinted at this in a holistic ‘new impact report’. This claimed the half million vehicles it sold yielded a combined saving of over 4 million metric tons of CO2’.
Tesla Answers Questions with its Unique Battery Recycling System
“A common question we hear is, ‘What happens to Tesla vehicle battery packs once they reach their end of life?’ the author wrote. “Because unlike gasoline, their value remains after they become exhausted. Therefore we can recover these materials and recycle them.”
However, Tesla’s plan to go about this is somewhat different from other automakers including BMW, Hyundai, and Renault. That’s because the latter want to second–life their batteries for energy storage. And then leave their eventual disposal to battery recyclers. Tesla says it has not yet reached that stage. When it eventually does it wants to process its batteries in-house, using its own unique battery recycling system.
However Tesla is Keeping Details Under Wraps at Gigafactory
Tesla is not giving much more away than that. However, it clearly wants to move down the life cycle chain and gain more of the action. All it really says is “At Gigafactory 1, Tesla is developing a unique battery recycling system that will process both battery manufacturing scrap, and end-of-life batteries.”
We therefore hope it is successful and lives up to its plan to maximize recovery of critical minerals including lithium and cobalt. Moreover, it also intends to recover aluminum, copper and steel “in forms optimized for new battery material production.” So there, perhaps we have their new policy in a nut shell. Would that be endlessly recycling materials within a sustainable, closed system? We can live with that!
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Preview Image: Model of Tesla Gigafactory 1
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