Sustainable design of fully recyclable all solid-state batteries
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Energy Sector Analysis
Preemptive sustainable strategies could assist in next-generation energy storage.
Sustainable design of fully recyclable all solid-state batteries* By Darren H.S. Tan and Zheng Chen
W
ith today’s rapidly increasing demand for lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) for emerging applications, such as electric vehicles (EVs) and large-scale grid storage, it begs the question of how sustainable batteries really are. Proponents of increasing electrification of our modern society often tout the environmental benefits of using battery energy storage over traditional fossil fuels, citing direct reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, especially when paired with renewable energy generation. Unfortunately, these often leave out considerations for the “dark side” of LIBs that few manufacturers in the battery industry have addressed: how to deal with batteries at their end of life. As the world accelerates toward displacing conventional vehicles with EVs, methods of handling large volumes of spent LIBs when these devices reach their end of life have not been fully developed. This potentially results in the accumulation of battery waste that will ultimately undo the environmental benefits batteries originally sought to achieve. Unlike conventional waste generated from consumer commodities such as paper, plastics, or metals, spent battery packs cannot be treated in the same category. They need to be collected, transported, stored, and treated using specialized processes and avoiding potential fire/hazards arising from embedded chemical energy within. Additionally, we do not want to simply dispose of LIBs, as they contain economically valuable materials, such as lithium, cobalt, nickel, and other transition metals. However, existing technologies used to recover and recycle batteries tend to be energy-intensive, costly, and use copious amounts of toxic chemicals, which can be difficult to handle. Conventional recycling technologies, such as pyrometallurgy or hydrometallurgy’s recovery efficiencies as a ratio of the entire battery, also remain relatively low because of poor recovery rates of other components in the cell. The biggest obstacle faced in LIB recycling today is not a lack of good technology but the fact that LIBs are not designed to be recycled. This naturally creates technical hurdles to engineer processes to dismantle, separate, and recover materials from within. To avoid repeating the same problem with the next generation of batteries, it is vital to explore strategies to incorporate recyclingfriendly designs before they enter the market. In the extended version of this work published in MRS Energy & Sustainability*, researchers adopted the concept of “design for recycling,” developing a sustainable and scalable strategy for next-generation
all solid-state batteries (ASSBs). It was demonstrated that such an approach dramatically reduces the sophistication, energy/ material input, and environmental impact of ASSB recycling compared to conventional LIBs. In traditional pyrometallurgical or hydromet
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