For the last decade, battery design has always been determined by product performance and of late by supply chain. Hardly, if ever, are they designed with material recovery in mind. With global demand surging higher, the decision of battery design will be dependent on recyclability and supply resilience. The design of today will dictate how much of tomorrow’s critical metals are recoverable and at what cost.
EV packs today can be something of a logistical nightmare. Most OEMs over the last decade shifted from module-rich to cell-to-pack (CTP) formats which improve volumetric efficiency, and reduce space, but make end-of-life (EoL) handling complicated. Recyclers have to process larger structures, when modular separations are not present, increasing preprocessing energy requirements.
Chemistry of batteries has consequences when it comes to trade-offs made in recycling. LFP (Lithium Iron Phosphate) has lower critical metal content (no cobalt, less nickel) but higher copper content. NMC (Nickel Manganese Cobalt) and NCA (Nickel Cobalt Aluminum Oxide cell) packs contain nickel and cobalt that are valuable to recover.
At scale, marketwide adoption of LFP would lower raw material intensity but will raise the economic importance of copper recovery since copper content is typically between 0.2 to 0.4 kg Cu per kWh, meaning that pack architecture that facilitates copper recovery is essential.
Manufacturers prioritize energy density, crashworthiness and thermal management more than ease of disassembly. The battery packs are sealed tightly together using glues, potting compounds, structural adhesives and robotic laser welds which complicates safe, high-value recovery. They can contaminate black mass, make disassembly more complicated and require chemical removal and reduce recycling throughput. Speed and safety during disassembly can be increased with simpler mechanical fastenings like clips etc as these components can become other material of value when it comes to recycling. Faster disassembly and other preprocessing steps lowers expenses as well as improves metal yields.
Black mass recovery and its quality are contingent on design. Packs that enable cell level or even module level separation allow isolation of chemistries and prevent chances of cross contamination. Since there are many popular chemistries available in the market, it is necessary that design enables the simplest separation since mixed preprocessing can reduce the yield of the critical metals in the black mass.
Globally, some countries are thinking ahead. The EU already mandates recycled content in manufacturing by 2031 and requires OEMs to design packs with easier disassembly. China is also standardising guidelines for EV makers. India’s Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) is also expected to tighten and recyclability is slowly but surely becoming a part of compliance instead of a corporate social responsibility (CSR) choice.
Recyclability has to be considered a core engineering constraint by the battery industry. Adhesives and composites use could be reduced along with designing packs with cell visibility and enabling cell level separation should be a thing of the future. Standardization, which has been avoided for competitiveness for now, must be implemented since that will actually reduce costs across the value chain in the long term. Batteries should be built to last but also be built to recover, otherwise the world will remain mineral dependent, the same way it was fossil dependent in the last century.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own, and do not necessarily reflect those held by pv magazine.
This content is protected by copyright and may not be reused. If you want to cooperate with us and would like to reuse some of our content, please contact: editors@pv-magazine.com.
By submitting this form you agree to pv magazine using your data for the purposes of publishing your comment.
Your personal data will only be disclosed or otherwise transmitted to third parties for the purposes of spam filtering or if this is necessary for technical maintenance of the website. Any other transfer to third parties will not take place unless this is justified on the basis of applicable data protection regulations or if pv magazine is legally obliged to do so.
You may revoke this consent at any time with effect for the future, in which case your personal data will be deleted immediately. Otherwise, your data will be deleted if pv magazine has processed your request or the purpose of data storage is fulfilled.
Further information on data privacy can be found in our Data Protection Policy.