Toyota Motor North America and the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory have recently signed a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA), a collaboration that could reduce the nation’s reliance on foreign sources of battery materials. The initiative is an attempt to find new ways of recycling battery materials and to eliminate vulnerabilities during the clean energy transition.
In most battery recycling processes today, the chemical structure of end-of-life battery components is broken down into the raw materials used in manufacturing. Unlike this traditional approach, a technique called direct recycling carefully extracts components from spent batteries. The components’ original structure is retained. If done well, manufacturers can re-use the components. By preserving the cathodes from end-of-life batteries, direct recycling can significantly reduce manufacturing costs and waste. It can also reduce the need for pristine raw materials.
“Direct recycling is cutting-edge in the battery industry,” said Argonne Principal Materials Scientist Albert Lipson. “There are a few startup companies with small-scale pilot projects underway. But implementation at commercial scale is still in need of new innovations.”
The process uses a magnet to separate cathodes and anodes from batteries, a patented recycling process developed by the Argonne-based ReCell Center.
Toyota is providing Argonne with both end-of-life and new Toyota plug-in hybrid EV batteries.
“Besides recycling end-of-life batteries, we’re also interested in recycling new batteries,” said Lipson. “Manufacturers produce some battery cells that fail quality testing. Cathodes can be taken out of failed cells and put back into the production process, which can lead to huge cost savings.”
“Having Argonne utilise our commercial battery products will help us evaluate the direct recycling process at an industrial scale for a diverse array of battery platforms and chemistries,” says Nik Singh, Senior Scientist in the Toyota Research Institute of North America (TRINA)’s Materials Research Department.
