Millions of electric cars are coming. What happens to all the dead batteries?
Recycling the battery can be a hazardous busines.
Current EV batteries are really not designed to be recycle. That wasn’t much of a problem when EVs were rare. But now the technology is taking off. Several carmakers have said they plan to phase out combustion engines within a few decades, and industry analysts predict at least 145 million EVs will be on the road by 2030, up from just 11 million last year.
Batteries differ widely in chemistry and construction, which makes it difficult to create efficient recycling systems. And the cells are often held together with tough glues that make them difficult to take apart. That has contributed to a economic obstacle: It’s often cheaper for batterymakers to buy freshly mined metals than to use recycled materials.
