EV Battery Recycling: Baby, I can recycle your car!
Batteries play an important role in decarbonising transport as well as helping to shift from fossil fuel to renewable power generation as a dispatchable source of electricity. But all those batteries will reach their end of life. “We need efficient recycling solutions in the next few years to be able to recycle the increasing quantities of e-car batteries,” explains Andreas Opelt, board member and battery recycling expert at the Association of Austrian Waste Management Companies (VOEB). “Currently, there are hardly any facilities for this. This is because e-car batteries are larger and heavier than conventional batteries and the metals they contain are difficult to separate.”
But the recycling of EV batteries is a special challenge, as Martin Reichstein, Managing Director of REDUX Recycling GmbH, explains. Recyclers therefore demand that manufacturers be held accountable and are already thinking about recyclable products when designing the batteries.
