Volkswagen Group just lately opened its first EV battery recycling plant in Salzgitter, Germany, after 10 years of analysis.
Designed to be extra power environment friendly than present battery recycling strategies, the pilot plant has a aim of having the ability to recapture as much as 95% of the supplies in an EV battery pack for potential reuse together with uncommon metals that retailer electrical energy.
“We all know from a few years of analysis that recycled battery uncooked supplies are simply as environment friendly as new ones,” stated Mark Moeller, the top of technical growth and the e-mobility enterprise unit at VW Group Parts.
“We plan to help our cell manufacturing sooner or later with the fabric we now have recovered. We actually need to use each potential gram of recovered materials because the demand for batteries rises sharply.”
As EV batteries include an advanced mixture of supplies, present battery recycling strategies require basically melting them down in a furnace, which solely recovers about 60% of the supplies inside. The method being developed at Salzgitter makes use of a number of mechanical steps designed to get better as much as 95% of a battery pack’s supplies for reuse. In an 880lb battery pack, the plant can get better about 220lb of key electrode minerals like lithium, nickel, cobalt and manganese.
This, the automaker claimed, positions VW as a pioneer in constructing a recyclable supplies cycle with nice potential for serving to scale back the necessity for mining of uncooked supplies and enhancing uncooked materials provide.
The Salzgitter plant can at present deal with about 3,600 battery packs a yr. As VW features extra follow with the method, it expects to develop the system to deal with the primary wave of retired EV battery packs within the 2020s – supplying supplies for brand spanking new batteries in a sustainable, closed-loop system.
