Battery recycling boosted by dentist-style ultrasonics, if manufacturers can cooperate

Re: Lead acid should die

Well, I have a Shorai lithium iron phosphate battery in my 14 year old FJR-1300.

It's got far better storage characteristics, and has no problem sitting 3 weeks. The only slight downside is that it doesn't like the cold. So if it's cold, it sometimes takes 2 tries to start.

You didn't mention it's a lot lighter. It feels like an empty battery case.

Re: Lead acid should die

The short answer is the Lead-Acid batteries are simple to make and relatively easy to recycle.

A lithium battery is significantly more expensive than the equivalent lead acid.

You must not live where it gets cold

I wouldn't want to try to start a car with a LiFePo4 battery when it is -25C

Re: This is news

Recycling has always been a major problem

But someone else's problem.

It'll take industry cooperation to commercialise the system, sadly: the Faraday Institution notes that in order for the batteries to be disassembled ready for processing, they must first be designed for disassembly.

There's the problem. So take a Tesla Model 3-

The Standard Range version carries 2,976 cells arranged in 96 groups of 31. The Long Range version carries 4,416 cells arranged in 96 groups of 46, and weighs[185] 1,060 pounds (480 kg)

And to paraphrase Mike Oldfield, they're tubular cells. So first extract battery packs from car, then extract batteries from packs, then extract chemicals from cells. All without your recycling plant self-combusting in a cloud of toxic flourine products.

So although most products now do a spot of Greenwashing and make various claims about how sustainable they are, reality tends to be that the 'recycling' problem is usually offloaded to someone else. They've flogged you the product, they've got your money, and disposal might be down to whoever's got a recycling contract with your Council.

So if manufacturers actually had to bear the full cost of recycling, rather than kicking the 4,416 metal cans down the road.. Then there may be some incentive to redesign products to make recycling cheaper or more efficient. That may take regulatory pressure, which would result in some financial difficulties, eg flog a Model 3 and book both the sale, but also a future liability for when it becomes end-of-life.

Somehow, I suspect there'd be a lot of lobbying to keep this as someone else's problem to avoid those liabilities.

AFAIK, Tesla's also going the opposite direction. Currently there's a bit of a market taking the battery packs from Teslas and re-purposing them. It's relatively easy to drop the pack, split out the bricks and do stuff with them. But there's also a trend to pack the batteries into more structural elements of the cars, making it harder to do that.. Which is a bit dfferent to the original vision of easily swappable battery packs for quick refuelling. And a handy benefit of building obsolecence into EVs, so drivers might want new ones every 3 years. Kinda problematic for resale values, but again, that's someone else's problem.

Is that a process for stripping every last fragment of flesh from bones?

I think it's more to do with getting a patent. Descibing it as a method to utilise ultrasound to remove stuff from surfaces wouldn't exactly be novel. Royalties are at stake!