The planned development of electric mobility will increase demand for batteries, with the International Energy Agency estimating that between 2019 and 2030, battery demand will grow 17-fold.
Between 2000 and 2018, the number of lithium-ion batteries manufactured was multiplied by 80. In 2018, 66% of them were used in electric vehicles .
The exact chemical composition of these storage components is difficult to identify, as it is a trade secret. Furthermore, improvements are regularly made to batteries to increase their performance, so their chemical composition evolves over time. In any case, the main materials involved in manufacturing LIBs are lithium, cobalt, nickel, manganese and graphite. These have all been identified as materials presenting supply and environmental risks.
Studies show that battery manufacturing can have serious impacts in terms of human toxicity or ecosystem pollution. On top of this is the need to monitor labour conditions in certain countries. Furthermore, analysing environmental impacts requires full knowledge of battery composition and manufacturing processes, but this information is difficult to obtain for obvious reasons related to industrial property.
But as the LIB technologies used for EVs do not all contain cobalt, the question of the economic model for recycling them remains unresolved, and there is still no real industrial sector for recycling these batteries. The main reason is the lack of a sufficient volume of batteries to be processed: the widespread roll-out of EVs is relatively recent and their batteries are not yet at the end of their life.
However, a major player such as RTE, the operator and manager of France’s electricity transmission network, believes that this application is ill-suited, functionally and economically, and recommends recycling EV batteries at the end of their first life instead.
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