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Krisztian Bocsi | Bloomberg Inventive Images | Getty Pictures
Swedish battery agency Northvolt mentioned Friday it had produced its first battery cell with what it described as “100% recycled nickel, manganese and cobalt.”
In an announcement, the Stockholm-headquartered firm — which has attracted funding from Goldman Sachs and Volkswagen, amongst others — mentioned the lithium-ion battery cell was manufactured by its recycling program, Revolt.
The cell’s nickel-manganese-cobalt cathode had been produced utilizing metals “recovered by means of the recycling of battery waste.” Exams confirmed that efficiency was on a par with cells made utilizing metals that had been freshly mined, Northvolt mentioned.
On Friday, the enterprise mentioned the design of its personal recycling facility could be expanded so it might recycle 125,000 tons of batteries yearly.
Development of the plant, known as Revolt Ett, is slated to start within the first quarter of 2022, with operations beginning in 2023.
It should use supplies from end-of-life EV batteries in addition to scrap from Northvolt Ett, the corporate’s gigafactory, the place the primary battery is predicted to be produced earlier than the tip of 2021. Each services shall be situated in Skellefteå, northern Sweden.
In keeping with the corporate, the Revolt plant will be capable to recycle supplies together with lithium, cobalt, manganese and nickel, supplying the gigafactory within the course of.
As well as, plastics, copper and aluminum will even be recovered and “recirculated again into manufacturing flows by means of native third-parties.”
In a cellphone interview with CNBC, Emma Nehrenheim, Northvolt’s chief environmental officer, mentioned: “Theoretically, you possibly can, by definition, recycle any metallic that you’ve in a battery and make a brand new battery out of it.”
“As a elementary technique, which means that when the market of EVs is mature — so, on the level the place [an] equal quantity of vehicles would enter the road as the quantity of vehicles needing to be scrapped or despatched off for recycling — you possibly can truly, in concept, have a really, very excessive recycling price … of batteries.”
“And which means that you wouldn’t be topic to a really liquid uncooked materials market and you’d additionally defend your self from very excessive footprints,” Nehrenheim, who can also be head of Revolt, mentioned.
Northvolt’s plans come at a time when the shift to electrical automobiles is starting to achieve momentum.
This week, signatories to a declaration on the COP26 local weather change summit mentioned they’d “work in the direction of all gross sales of latest vehicles and vans being zero emission globally by 2040, and by no later than 2035 in main markets.”
Whereas the U.S., China and carmakers together with Volkswagen and Toyota had been absent from the declaration, signatories did embrace the U.Ok., Mexican and Canadian governments and main automotive corporations resembling Ford, Normal Motors and Volvo Vehicles.
As world provide chains face critical stress resulting from a mess of things, the notion of recycling supplies and growing a round financial system is beginning to turn into a pretty proposition to some companies, together with these within the electrical car sector.
In March of this yr, Lucien Mathieu, from the Brussels-based marketing campaign group Transport & Setting, sought to spotlight the potential of recycling within the EV business.
In an announcement on T&E’s web site, he mentioned: “Not like right this moment’s fossil gas powered vehicles, electrical automobile batteries are a part of a round financial system loop the place battery supplies will be reused and recovered to supply extra batteries.”
The recycling of battery supplies, Mathieu argued, was essential when it got here to lowering “the stress on main demand for virgin supplies” and limiting “the impacts uncooked materials extraction can have on the surroundings and on communities.”
‘Far more native’
Northvolt’s Nehrenheim was requested about how necessary she felt concepts about recycling and a round financial system could be going ahead.
“I believe that is going to be the important thing driver for any new business,” she mentioned. “There shall be no disruptive expertise that may stay with out this and I believe that in the long term … recycled supplies in any business will out compete another.”
“Long run, it will be rather more worthwhile as soon as the processes are established to only use a product to supply a brand new product,” she went on to state.
“You are lowering dependence … on the uncooked materials market, you will have a way more sustainable supply … it is rather more native.”
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