Harper believes that robotics and automation can make the process faster and safer. Apple built a robot called Daisy that can disassemble iPhones for the precious minerals inside.
Automobile manufacturers also play a role, says Harper. “There are many arguments in favor of designing for recycling,” he says. Currently, most car batteries and parts are glued together, making them costly to remove.
There is also a business opportunity. The lithium-ion battery recycling market is estimated to be around $ 12 billion by 2025. The European Union is updating its battery directive, which prescribes a minimum amount of recycled material for new batteries.
While the main burden of the battery recycling challenges seems a long way off, some of it is needed now, says Simon Moores, managing director of Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. Even in the manufacturing process, “the reject rate can initially be 25 percent,” he says. “Recycling is required in the vicinity of battery systems.”
There is a risk that the UK will fall behind on recycling. According to a report from the University of Warwick, there are no major lithium-ion battery recycling facilities in the UK and most of our waste is exported. They argue that recycling could provide 22 percent of UK gigafactory demand for raw materials.
Harper says recycling batteries shouldn’t be seen as a painful expense. He notes that Chinese battery manufacturers like BYB are already exploring how their cells can be recycled to reuse these rare materials at low cost.
He argues that the industry’s current approach to batteries, which is to “shred them up and then figure out what to do with that waste” – which will begin with building battery companies and automakers in the UK – needs to change . “If you want to restore the cathode intact, it would be much better to design batteries so that they can be dismantled,” says Harper.
For him, it is a way for the UK to extract raw materials that may be rare in the UK and create a domestic supply from scratch. “These metals are really valuable and we have no domestic supply in the UK. It’s high-tech urban mining, ”he says.
If he’s right, Britain’s planned mega-factories, like those at Coventry Airport and Blythe, will soon have giga-recycling facilities next to them.
