China Is Already Winning the Next Great Race in Electric Cars
Extracting metals from spent battery packs will be the key to meeting a surge in demand.
Spent electric car batteries are crushed at Duesenfeld’s plant in Germany
Photographer: Wolfram Schroll/Duesenfeld GmbH
Battery packs clamber up a conveyor belt before dropping into a flame-proof chamber, where they are crushed into gray metallic mush, a cocktail containing the car fuel of the future.
The facility separates components like cobalt, nickel, graphite and lithium from waste plastic particles. Factory owner Duesenfeld GmbH is bracing for a tidal wave of spent batteries as carmakers move beyond combustion engines in huge numbers. Over the next decade, the pile of retired power plants will grow from almost nothing to 1.6 million tons annually, according to BloombergNEF.