Design for recycling: The circular economy starts here
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Inside: EDITORIAL
Design for recycling: The circular economy starts here ENERGY SECTOR ANALYSIS
Sustainable design of fully recyclable all solid-state batteries ENERGY SECTOR ANALYSIS
Considerations for leveraging flexible loads to decarbonize electricity and transportation
ENERGY QUARTERLY ORGANIZERS CHAIR Y. Shirley Meng, University of California, San Diego, USA Andrea Ambrosini, Sandia National Laboratories, USA Kristen Brown, Electron, UK David Cahen, Weizmann Institute, Israel Russell R. Chianelli, The University of Texas at El Paso, USA George Crabtree, Argonne National Laboratory, USA Brian J. Ingram, Argonne National Laboratory, USA Elizabeth A. Kócs, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA Sabrina Sartori, University of Oslo, Norway Subhash L. Shinde, University of Notre Dame, USA Anke Weidenkaff, Fraunhofer IWKS and Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany M. Stanley Whittingham, Binghamton University, The State University of New York, USA Steve M. Yalisove, University of Michigan, USA
“Sustainable design of fully recyclable all solid-state batteries” title image credit: Shutterstock. “Considerations for leveraging flexible loads to decarbonize electricity and transportation” title image: Hele-On 29-passenger fuel cell electric bus. Credit: US Hybrid.
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Design for recycling: The circular economy starts here “If it can’t be reduced, repaired, rebuilt, refurbished, refinished, resold, recycled or composted, then it should be restricted, redesigned or removed from production.” –Peter Seeger
Over the last few decades, renewable energy technologies and storage have matured and increased their penetration into the worldwide energy portfolio. However, after >20 years in service, the earlier generations of renewable technologies, such as wind and solar, are nearing the end of their service lifetime. The result is a potential glut of components such as photovoltaic (PV) cells and wind turbine blades without a clear path to recycling or reuse. According to the International Renewable Energy Agency, by 2050, 78 million tons of PV panel waste will be generated. As first-generation turbines reach end of life, thousands of 15–20-m-long blades await incineration or recycling/reuse. Batteries for energy storage contain critical elements such as cobalt and lithium that are not easily recovered. Even though many components can be recycled or reused, the process often requires thermal, chemical, and mechanical processes that are often expensive and complex and deter industry from committing funds and efforts to reuse or recycle. Therefore these “green” technologies, over their lifetime, turn out to be less environmentally friendly than originally intended. To combat inadvertent creation of waste from green technology, there has been increasing effort to espouse a circular economy, in which the linear approach to manufacturing is replaced by a system in which products are reused, repurposed, or re
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