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

The article is very, very light with details. The university or research center is not named. No scientist is named. No link. Nothing that tells "look, we're telling you real, solid, serious stuff."

Here is another article with that details : https://www.techspot.com/news/112051-japan-finds-way-recover...

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.

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...

So this isn't groundbreaking results and the article itself is of questionable quality without sufficient detail as to why this is a newsworthy result. How is this the top rated article on hacker news? A more meaningful example would have been the paper that sets out a scalable and cost-effective route for closing the loop on LFP materials, while demonstrating that high-yield lithium recovery and environmental responsibility are not mutually exclusive: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092134492...

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.

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.

Incidentally, companies developing technologies for reusing EV batteries in grid storage applications (where even <80% capacity EV batteries are just fine for many years), have trouble getting enough EV batteries, because they last much longer than we were made to believe.

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.

This isn't just an LLMism, it's a painfully redundant phrase. Not much worth me reading forward if even the authors weren't arsed to write the damn thing.

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

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.

The technical challenge has never been recovering materials. It's recovering them cheaply enough that recycling beats mining. If this process scales economically, it could end up being more important than another small improvement in battery chemistry.

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.

It looks like it’s not so much a breakthrough than an ongoing research that aims at producing this kind of results at scale:

https://green-innovation.nedo.go.jp/en/article/liquid-lithiu...

“While these targets have already been achieved at the laboratory level, we are now moving into the phase of mid-scale demonstration,”

It's going to be a strange day 8-10 years from now (my EV is 2.5 years old) when it comes time to try and get an aftermarket or OEM replacement battery for it, hopefully the larger one from a later model.

If recycling is set up properly the core charge is going to be enormous and make me question if its worth turning in the old battery or repurposing it as home electricity storage.

> 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.

OK, huge title with little detail.

Can't believe until i saw a comment 'Less dependence on China', then i got it.

Believe in what you want to believe, not depends on truth.

Online hydrometallurgy plants are already more effective than this.

Redwood Materials already recovers 95% so why is this news?

A 90% recovery process does not help much if most batteries never make it into the right recycling stream in the first place.

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

lithium is $22/kg, 100KWh battery is 10kg lithium, i.e. the question is can you do it for $200?

So long or short Lithium?

worth noting this isn't ground breaking or anything, the status quo for lithium recovery from battery recycling in many countries is already > 90%

I would like govts to legislate this and make recycling a necessary part of the product lifecycle, maybe help companies out, the recovery is a lot less energy intensive and harmful for the environment than mining and sourcing them generally, I genuinely question why hasn't it scaled up across the world, it doesn't seem like it's impossible challenge, perhaps until recently sourcing it was cheap enough that no one invested in scaling it up.

I remember how Lead acid battery recycling has now become commonplace even in fairly under developed parts of the world. I guess it's all about incentives. sigh.

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

Costs?

This whole time I thought lithium was recyclable. We have been wasting our time on this! 50 pct recovery is terrible.

seems as credible as room temperature super conductors

My guy just called human rights abuses (lithium mining) ‘geopolitically complicated’

why bother? japan hate EV

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