How Profitable Is Battery Recycling Business ?
How Profitable Is Battery Recycling Business? Today’s, the battery recycling is essential to be concerned about the environmental, economic and resource sustainability. The use of recovered components generates savings in raw materials, manufacturing costs and energy consumption, leading to a reduction in the environmental impact. The diverse structure of batteries makes recycling process, including collection and disassembly, more complex and sometimes economically infeasible. Commercial viable battery recycling should support to the new battery production by eliminating the obstacles such as high initial investments, low efficiency in the final product, negative values at the end of battery life and inevitable polllution.
The recycling consists of collection and transportation of spent batteries, battery pack disassembly, dismantling, physical and chemical seperation. The disassembly and chemical seperation operations are the most expensive aspects of the recycling process.
Battery Pack Disassembly
Battery pack disassembly is an important step in reducing recycling costs, especially for countries where labor costs are high. Since disassembly cost depends on the number of steps required to dismantle a pack to its constituent cells, battery packs should be designed to simplify disassembly.
Battery packs should be ‘‘DESIGNED FOR DISASSEMBLY’’ in order to reduce disassembly costs.
A partially or fully automated disassembly process could decrease disassembly cost considering the requirements for streamlined battery design during the battery production will allow the optimization of disassembly processes and thus reduce costs.
Battery Separation Techniques
Recycling techniques can be roughly categorized in three techniques: Hydrometallurgical, pyrometallurgical and direct reycyling processes. Although the recycling of valuable transition metals with pyrometallurgical process (smelting) can be obtain, lithium and aluminum remains in the slag, which makes them difficult to recover. Hydrometallurgical processing (leaching) and direct recovery are both potentially economical on a smaller scale and would not require as large an investment because the operation occurs at lower temperature. The hydrometallurgical process is slightly cheaper than direct recycling.
Profitable Battery Recycling As A Circular Business Model
Profitable battery recycling as a circular business model requires a multi-stakeholder perspective and inter-industry partnership to create the supply chain network. In this way, the operation costs that have been distributed to unit battery would be lower with the large-scale spent battery collected and the process efficiency improved.
Moreover, policy interventions in the form of subsidies and other financial means might be necessary to ensure a profitable process. This is especially important in the first few years of a recycling plant’s operation until economies of scale are realized in future battery chemistries.
The regulation of the European Parliament and the Council purposes to promote circular value chain among the end-user, battery manufacturer and recycler firms with standardized battery design.
In the framework of this regulations, manufacturing companies can achieve to increase recycled material use in production lines motivated by implementing circular product design.
Proses Makina Co. focuses on the identification of the optimal separation level as the solution to achieve the highest profitability from the recycling process and, at the same time, produces the minimum environmental impact. Our R&D studies based on two main activities which are recovery of valuable metals at high purity and to produce p-CAM (precursor of cathode active materials) at high quality in the feasible scenario.
