While electric cars have seen a sharp rise in sales in recent years, the very first commercial models date back some 20 years and their batteries are now well worn out. Toyota offers to recycle them.
Recycling electric car batteries will become a key issue in the coming years, as end-of-life vehicles will begin to accumulate. After all, the first Priuses were launched in 1997, 25 years ago! Toyota has signed a partnership with Redwood Materials, a battery recycling company created by Tesla co-founder JB Straubel.
The circular battery economy
The objective is to recover old batteries from electric cars and recondition them for resale. It is also possible to dismantle them to collect the materials needed to manufacture new batteries: more specifically, Redwood intends to produce materials for anodes and cathodes, two major components for battery cells.
New electric cars are obviously not affected by this initiative. The two partners are targeting the first wave of these vehicles, more specifically the Prius launched twenty years ago in California. But Redwood does not want to stop at Toyota: the company has also signed agreements with Ford and Volvo.
The company said it receives the battery equivalent of 6 gigawatt-hours each year. It hopes to produce 100 GWh of components by 2025, a volume which it will multiply by five by 2030. These are ambitious objectives, especially since Redwood’s dismantling and recycling capacities have not yet been fully tested.
Nevertheless, this issue of recycling electric vehicle batteries will become more prominent in the years to come, and it will be necessary to set up channels to ensure the circular economy of these components.
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