Making Green Cars Greener with Battery Recycling
The widespread implementation of electric vehicles will go a long way toward eliminating the greenhouse gas emissions of the transportation sector. But these GHGs don’t just come from the tailpipe. There’s another major culprit of GHG emissions, one that the electric vehicle industry might need some help from policy makers to avoid: battery recycling.
Current lithium-ion battery recycling policies and processes were designed for the relatively low size and volume of consumer electronic batteries—AAs, AAAs, and the like. But with nearly every major automaker committing to all electric or hybrid-electric product lines in the coming years, this huge flood of new lithium-ion batteries will require a completely different approach to battery recycling than is currently available. In their paper, “Examining different recycling processes for lithium-ion batteries,” Materials Science and Engineering/Engineering and Public Policy Professor and Director of the Wilton E. Scott Institute for Energy Innovation Jay Whitacre, and Postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University Rebecca Ciez, have laid out a path forward for battery makers and policy makers alike to help ensure that this influx of lithium-ion batteries doesn’t undo the good work of electric vehicles.