Japan develops a method to recover up to 90% of lithium from used EV batteries

It really should not be surprising that we can get very high recovery percentages from batteries -- we do not mine elemental lithium, so the processes we use for extraction are already designed to extract lithium from fairly low-purity sources. In contrast, lithium batteries are an incredibly high-purity source of lithium. The main question is when it will become cost-effective to create recycling pipelines.

Lead acid batteries had a similar trajectory and modern lead acid batteries are effectively 100% recycled.

The article seems to be very unspecific about what it is this company does that is so different. It also steps over the fact that there are already quite a few companies active in the US, EU, and China that are recycling batteries. Nor is the cited percentage that remarkable. That's ballpark what competitors are achieving as well. Probably a bit more. 10% lithium is a lot of lithium to not recover. Most natural deposits of lithium have very low concentrations of it.

The main thing actually holding back the recycling industry is the lack of batteries that need recycling, not the lack of technology needed to recycle them. Most of the batteries produced in the last ten years are still being used. And quite a few might head for a second life in storage for another decade or so. It's probably going to be another decade before recycling hits a scale where it becomes a significant and lucrative source of valuable raw materials.

And as others mentioned, it's not just about recycling the lithium in batteries. It's not like cobalt, nickel, copper, graphite, etc. end up on the trash heap.

Some geopolitical context:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Senkaku_boat_collision_in...

https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/comme...

Japan was one of the first countries to be hit with rare-earth export-restrictions by China - going back to 2010. It seems that a lot of policy came out from this unpleasant shock, incl. the decision by Toyota to focus on developing FCEVs which would be less dependent on Chinese supply-chains. Ironically, the resulting vacuum may have actually led to Chinese/American companies gaining market share in the BEV space.

Still, given how things are going, FCEVs (and Japan with it) might actually end-up having the last laugh.

Mercedes opened a battery recycling plant in 2024, claiming a recycling rate of 96%, of the whole battery. So not sure how much of a breakthrough this japanese tech is https://group.mercedes-benz.com/company/news/recycling-facto...

according to https://x.com/Mith_/status/2041911606213537971

> The industry standard for the recovery of lithium (remember there is a difference between recovery and extraction) is 90%, with some platforms now achieving 95%+ like those that use carbonation.

The 90% recovery rate is not groundbreaking by itself. The real value is lower contamination and emissions—but it still needs to prove cost-effective at industrial scale.

This article is poor, because lithium is just one part of the value contained within EV batteries. Far more valuable is any nickel, cobalt and graphite. Equally valuable is any copper and aluminium. Unless you're effectively recycling a significant number of the major materials, it's not enough.

Furthermore, it's not a remarkable achievement. By contrast to this headline, Redwood Materials claims "Redwood’s technology can recover, on average, more than 95% of materials like nickel, cobalt, copper, aluminum, lithium and graphite in a lithium-ion battery."[0]

[0] https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/recycle-with-us/

What a poorly written article

Can this be replaced with the original NHK World article?

> This new technique doesn’t just recycle materials; it recovers most of them at an unbelievable rate.

I'm so tired of reading articles written by LLM. There are several sites that just ingest material (like studies) and crap out low-effort LLM articles.

What about the cost? In China, most used batteries are just burned and buried, so the recycling cost is very low.

So long or short Lithium?

The key point will be the energy inputs, and catalyst or other process input losses. Not the % recovery, its more recovery at an economically viable cost

Many processes could recover the inputs. Some are tremendously polluting. Cheap methods to recover lead from older lead-acid car batteries would be an example, or the way scavengers burn plastic insulation of recovered copper wiring.

TL;DR exernalities and economics and pollution drive recycling issues, not % recovery at this point. We know how to recover a lot of the inputs. Knowing how to industrialise and scale it up is what counts.

John McCarthy (of LISP fame) was an (in)famous curmudgeon on USENET, frequently used to say future generations will thank us for making giant collections in the ground of highly valuable recoverable industrial inputs, what we call "rubbish dumps" -He was only partially less wrong, but had a point to make about the cost of inputs to industry vs raw mining costs. If we do come up with a process to strip mine rubbish dumps and send feedstocks in the appropriate directions there's a lot there. Complex plastics, Metals, Organics, Acids, Methane Gas, you-name-it. We already collect and harvest the methane to drive other dump works, the idea of mining the materials isn't "wrong" as much as insufficiently economic right now against raw material sources.

“Japan”, as in the whole country developed this tech ?

why bother? japan hate EV

Scientists found a way to extract up to 90% of oxygen from air! They call it “breathing”.