Why recycle batteries?
Why recycle batteries and not just throw them in the bin with other waste?
The reasons why we recycle batteries
In the past few decades, governing bodies around the world have dedicated increasing amounts of time, money and energy toward battery recycling. This is because:
Over 1 million tons of batteries enter the EU every year, and this number is always growing. Battery-powered devices are increasingly in demand and our consumer culture means these devices are constantly being replaced with the latest upgrade.
Many batteries contain precious technology metals which are in limited supply around the world. Other batteries can be recycled to create new batteries, moving us toward a closed-loop process and creating an economic and resource-management incentive behind recycling certain battery types.
Many older battery types contain toxic substances such as lead, cadmium and mercury, while newer batteries are more volatile and can lead to fires if disposed of incorrectly.
Recycling batteries has become an important industry in many countries, providing employment for hundreds of thousands of people and pushing innovations in recycling. The battery industry is a fast growing sector of the world economy, and that won’t change any time soon.
Recycling reduces the waste in landfills, preserves natural resources, creates employment and innovation, and helps to protect our environment from potentially dangerous materials. The main alternative to recycling batteries is dumping them in landfills, but there is only so much space on earth for our rubbish. Anything that we can responsibly recycle, we should.
Battery recycling is a relatively new industry, and has grown significantly in sophistication and scope since its inception. The first legislation governing battery recycling in Europe was introduced in 1991 (European Council Directive on Batteries and Accumulators 91/157/EEC). It identified 3 hazardous metals - cadmium, mercury and lead - that required proper treatment when disposed of. The high toxicity of mercury was a key factor in the decision to legislate battery recycling.
Similar directives were introduced around the world, which soon saw the decline of mercury based batteries which are no longer in production today, though some are still in circulation.
This was a first step, though it only governed particularly harmful batteries, ignoring many other types. The goal was to contain harmful substances. The boom of mobile phones, computers, and similar portable devices was the next catalyst for change. A growing demand for rechargeable batteries led to innovations in the battery industry and a new need for recycling on a much larger scale.
Since then new directives have been implemented (EU 2006 Battery Directive / Japan Portable Rechargeable Battery Recycling Center (JBRC) / Call2Recycle) and the use of limited resources such as lithium and other technology metals in batteries has further incentivised the battery recycling industry.
Current limitations in battery recycling
Unfortunately, at the moment, we don’t have the appropriate technology to make it economically or environmentally viable to recycle every part of every used battery. Extracting certain chemicals would require unreasonable amounts of energy and produce large amounts of waste byproducts, harming the environment rather than protecting it.
There are different reasons why recycling is not always the right answer (yet):
With current methods, some materials are too costly or require too much energy to be responsibly recycled. This can be due to the chemical reactions involved, or the structure of the battery itself.
Some batteries like “lead-acid” have a very simple structure that facilitates recycling, whereas lithium-ion batteries have a complex structure, and are thus harder to recycle.
Some recycling processes only allow us to recover particularly valuable components by sacrificing less valuable ones.
For example, pyrometallurgical processes are very effective at recovering valuable materials like cobalt and nickel from lithium-ion batteries, however, this comes at the expense of wasting other materials such as lithium (a valuable material, but expensive to reclaim and only present in very small quantities) and plastics.
Sometimes, downcycling is the only way
Some materials can presently only be downcycled, making them less valuable and functional each time they are recycled until they are no longer useful at all. For example, the plastics used in battery materials are of low value, so creating an economically viable closed loop recycling process for them is very difficult.
Working towards a circular economy
We’re constantly evolving our methods and finding cleaner, greener ways of recycling used batteries. With this in mind, our ultimate goal is to make the battery industry a circular economy - a system aimed at producing zero waste by creating a circular flow of resources, so all end-products are recycled or reused to sustain the system.
