Battery recycling reduces energy usage by up to 70%, recovers up to 95% of valuable metals, and minimizes waste through circular economy practices.
Cost-Effectiveness
Upfront Costs vs. Ongoing Cost Savings
Establishing a battery recycling facility can be a capital-intensive project, but it also has good financial prospects in the long run. For example, it can cost between $15 million and $50 million to build a modern recycling plant, depending on capacity and technology. However, the combined use of multiple plants can process thousands of tons of waste batteries each year to obtain materials with monetary value, including lithium, cobalt, and nickel. Significantly, these collected materials can largely amortize the upfront costs. One obvious result is that the recovered lithium can be sold at a price lower than the seemingly stable lithium price, which has been fluctuating around $10,000 per ton.
Comparison with Raw Material Extraction Costs
In the face of these costs, recycling lithium-ion batteries can be a uniquely cost-effective solution. Extracting metals from old batteries is 50% more economical than mining new resources. This is mainly because less energy is required and the most energy-intensive parts of the process of mining ore (extraction and refining) can be omitted. In addition, when raw material sources become increasingly scarce and difficult to operate, this leads to higher mining costs, so this is a typical model to improve the cost advantage of recycling.
In addition, recycling is also a strategic advantage in places where raw material resources are scarce. By recycling old batteries, countries that rely on imported metals can reduce that reliance, retain more value for their economies, and stabilize market supply chains.
Energy Efficiency
Energy savings vs. virgin production
Recycling batteries uses far less energy than mining and producing new resources. Recovering lithium, cobalt, and nickel from spent batteries uses about 70% less energy than refining the raw materials. The big drop in energy use is primarily related to bypassing the initial energy-intensive parts of mining, such as drilling, blasting, and moving ore.
Advantages of advanced recycling technologies
However, with the advent of newer recycling technologies, the process has evolved to be more efficient and less energy-intensive (or even energy-free). Hydrometallurgical processing uses chemicals to extract metals at much lower temperatures than traditional smelting, reducing energy use by orders of magnitude. For example, hydrometallurgical processes require about 100 kWh of energy per ton of batteries processed, while smelting requires about 500 kWh.
On top of that, recycling technology is constantly improving, which in turn will make the process even better from an energy perspective. This includes new mechanical separation methods that can recover materials with very low energy—making the entire process much more efficient.
Resource Maximization
Efficient recovery of precious metals
Battery recycling can recover high-value metals such as lithium, cobalt and nickel that are needed to make new batteries. With modern recycling processes, up to 95% of these metals can be recovered and used to re-manufacture new batteries. This significantly reduces the amount of raw materials that need to be extracted, most of which will cause environmental pollution in production.
Reducing waste through a circular economy approach
Circular economy principles are now being applied to reuse almost all components of spent batteries. For example, plastics and electrolytes are also recovered and reused, not just metals. It makes full use of resources rather than letting any material go to waste, with 9 out of 10 recycling facilities in the UK exporting less than 5% of their waste.
Maximizing the use of resources is important not only for growing environmental concerns, but also for economic balance considerations. Recycled materials help reduce dependence on imported raw materials, thereby strengthening the supply chain of battery manufacturers.