Mercedes-Benz is getting into the battery recycling game. The automaker on Monday opened a recycling plant in Southern Germany that it says makes it “the first car manufacturer worldwide to close the battery recycling loop with its own in-house facility.”
The facility will process enough recycled materials to manufacture at least 50,000 new battery modules per year, Mercedes says. A Mercedes EQE sedan requires 10 battery modules, each containing numerous individual cells. So rough math suggests that the plant could generate enough renewed materials for at least 5,000 vehicles with its current technology.
The plant is Europe’s first to use a “mechanical-hydrometallurgical process,” which Mercedes says uses less energy and produces less waste than the more prevalent pyrometallurgy approach. Mercedes isn't going it alone here, but rather it's teaming up with a technology partner called Primobius. For anybody curious about how this process actually works, I’ll let Mercedes explain:
“For the first time in Europe, the Mercedes-Benz battery recycling plant covers all steps from shredding battery modules to drying and processing active battery materials. The mechanical process sorts and separates plastics, copper, aluminum, and iron in a complex, multi-stage process. The downstream hydrometallurgical process is dedicated to the so-called black mass. These are the active materials that make up the electrodes of the battery cells. The valuable metals cobalt, nickel and lithium are extracted individually in a multi-stage chemical process.”
EV battery recycling is still a niche industry and a nascent part of the EV supply chain. But it’s set to grow significantly as more EV batteries reach end of life and as demand for battery materials rises. By recycling old batteries, carmakers can reduce reliance on existing battery supply chains, which are concentrated in China. They can also avoid mining more lithium, cobalt and nickel, thus cutting down their impact on the environment.
The critical materials that make an EV battery run are highly recyclable. Case in point: Mercedes says its process will recover 96% of the raw materials in a recycled battery.
Other carmakers have waded into this world as well. BMW recently struck a deal with Redwood Materials, a battery recycler based in Nevada, to process old batteries from BMWs, Minis and Rolls-Royces. Volkswagen and Ford have made similar deals. So it may not be too long before most of the stuff inside of your car's battery is on its second go around.
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