What Tesla plan/did to recycle lithium-ion battery?

[Mille Pun]

With the life cycle of a battery with just a decade or less, recycling would be a game changing factor to tesla

 

[MitchJi]

With the life cycle of a battery with just a decade or less, recycling would be a game changing factor to tesla

The long term GF plan is that a substantial portion of the output, something like 20-30 percent will come from recycled packs. JB said its cheaper to mine the packs.

 

[Chickenlittle]

With the life cycle of a battery with just a decade or less, recycling would be a game changing factor to tesla

What is your data of a decade or less life? The pack has been out for less than 3 years. Do you have a time machine or just window to future. Yes pack can ne recycled. Projections on roadster packs have been wrong and they last longer than projected. My roadster is now 6 years old with no loss of range. It is projected to lose 30% over 8 years even if it did that, why would it be recycled at that point? Your question is prefaced by a conjecture on your part and indicates your bias. Why not just ask what will be done with packs once degraded rather than slip in a negative conjecture with no evidence

 

[Alfred]

With the life cycle of a battery with just a decade or less, recycling would be a game changing factor to tesla

For the Roadster Tesla Motors had concluded an agreement with Umicore. There are no costs to the original battery owner and costs for Tesla were said to be covered by the value of the materials recovered. There is no pending "game changing issue" to be addressed.

 

[ItsNotAboutTheMoney]

If you look at Gigafactory presentations you'll see a recycling component. Recycling obviously makes sense since they'd be dealing with a large amount of the commodities.

But there are a lot of unknowns about recycling technology, since lithium batteries are relatively young, and sometimes recycling processes lead to "downcycling", where the quality of the output isn't as good as virgin material.

Right now there's a low volume of batteries to be recycled, because people buy up salvage packs for re-use/re-purposing, volumes are low and cars are new. There's a Catch 22 that you can't have good recycling economics until you have volume, and you'll get better volume with good recycling economics.

But, on your assumption of a 10 year life, that _might_ be the automotive life. Degradation will vary. But even then, after 10 years there will, on average still be significant remaining life in the battery, which is why all of the manufacturers are looking to static energy storage as secondary use. That could allow a battery pack to be used for another 10 years. Aside from hobbyists building their own home storage, I expect secondary use to be in large commercial installations where they would have the scale and expertise to handle a more frequent hot replacement of batteries within a storage array.

 

[MitchJi]

But there are a lot of unknowns about recycling technology, since lithium batteries are relatively young, and sometimes recycling processes lead to "downcycling", where the quality of the output isn't as good as virgin material.

I started buying lithium video camera batteries in 1996, 20 years ago.

And I don't think Tesla will have any difficulty figuring out how to get high quality materials from their Packs.

 

[flankspeed8]

I started buying lithium video camera batteries in 1996, 20 years ago.

And I don't think Tesla will have any difficulty figuring out how to get high quality materials from their Packs.

Hopefully they, and all EV manufactures will have the commitment to do so even when mining new material and manufacture may be more cost effective as it is now. What is going on with commodities is crazy and a lot of recyclables, especially plastic are heading for the landfill because cheap oil makes it cheaper to make new product from scratch.