TUT4: EV Battery Recycling Technology: Challenges and Opportunities

Monday, March 21 | 10:30-12:30pm

About the Tutorial: This tutorial will summarize the current status of recycling, for both consumer electronic and automotive batteries, and proceed to describe technical and institutional factors that could enhance or impede future recycling success. It will address the special challenge of recycling automotive Li-ion batteries into viable products at a reasonable cost and within the bounds of environmental, health, and safety regulations. Ideally, recycling will also reduce both demand for raw critical materials as well as energy and environmental impacts of production. This tutorial will examine the potential of current and developmental recycling processes to meet these goals.

You Can Expect to Learn:

• Lithium-ion recycling evaluation
• Scale and integration of advanced recycling
• Materials testing and battery prototyping
• Safe deactivation of batteries

Instructors:

Linda Gaines, Ph.D., Systems Analyst, Argonne National Lab

Linda holds a BA in Chemistry and Physics from Harvard, and a PhD in Physics from Columbia. Her primary interest is problem solving, applied to efficient use of resources. She began her 35+ years at Argonne by writing a series of handbooks of energy and material flows in petroleum refining, organic chemicals and copper industries, which provided background for studies of technical and institutional issues involved in recycling discarded tires, packaging and other energy-intensive materials. Dr Gaines has examined the costs and impacts on energy use and the environment of production and recycling of advanced-design automobiles, trucks, trains and batteries. She has also examined the potential growth of electricity demand by industry and performed technical and economic analysis of alternative fuels, including hydrogen and biofuels. Her most recent work has involved studying ways to reduce petroleum use and other impacts from transport by recycling of batteries and also by reducing vehicle idling. She is an editor of the new open-access journal Sustainable Materials and Technologies.

Steve Sloop, Ph.D., President, On-To Technology

Dr. Sloop is the President of On-To Technology. OnTo develops and patents advanced battery recycling innovations that produce manufacturing quality electrode materials from recycled batteries. These breakthrough technologies are available to serve the battery industry by reducing the cost of recycling end-of-useful-life cells and through efficient conservation of critical materials for applications from portable power to electric vehicles.