EV battery recycling

While the rapid transition to electromobility is certainly a good thing from an environmental perspective, there’s no way of glossing over a hard truth: it’s going to require a lot of lithium-ion batteries. When Bosch Rexroth associate Sebastian Krieger started thinking about the challenges this will entail, two questions popped into his mind. First, where will the valuable raw materials come from to create that many batteries? He knew that many of the metals required in vehicle battery (also called traction battery) production — especially lithium, cobalt, nickel, and manganese — are already subject to supply-chain disruptions as well as geopolitical and climate-related risks in their countries of origin, and that persistent shortages could derail international electromobility efforts. Second, with so many batteries being produced to fuel the boom, what will happen to them at the end of their service lives? After all, even when not subjected to extreme temperatures and frequent fast recharging (both of which wear out cells faster), a li-ion vehicle battery typically only lasts about 8-15 years before it’s considered no longer viable. As things currently stand, most batteries are simply disposed of when they reach this point, but considering the toxicity of many cell components, this brings its own set of environmental headaches.

To Sebastian, who is head of a team tasked with identifying lighthouse projects for Bosch’s Industrial Technology business sector, the answer to both these questions was one and the same: as many of these batteries as possible need to be recycled. When he took a closer look, however, he discovered that the European recycling industry is extremely underprepared for the mounting wave of end-of-life vehicle batteries. There was, however, strong interest from recycling companies in finding technology partners who could help design solutions to ramp up and streamline battery recycling, particularly considering current draft legislation to set minimum recycling quotas in the EU.

Bosch Rexroth is synonymous with flexible automated solutions for industrial assembly, to which the division can also add more than a decade and half of experience in manufacturing traction batteries. To recycle, however, you have to take a step in the other direction. “The challenge was to transfer our competence in manufacturing into solutions for recycling. But we quickly realized that what we can assemble, we can also disassemble,” says Sebastian with a smile.

This approach laid the foundation for developing a package of solutions that cover everything from the initial analysis of a battery module to opening it up, discharging it, disassembly and separation of raw materials by type, to a track and trace system that facilitates environmental monitoring. “This solution set forms what we call the pre-treatment phase. With it, we prepare batteries for the shredding as well as the pyro- and hydrometallurgical processes that extract the battery’s valuable raw materials and make them available for reuse.”

In addition to saving time, the automated solution also minimizes the not inconsiderable safety risks, from short circuits and fires to chemical exposure and injury caused by maneuvering batteries that can weigh more than a ton. In addition, the team’s solution has also been designed to repurpose the energy recovered in the discharging process, using it to power the facility’s machinery or even feeding it into the grid. In a nutshell, then, Sebastian’s team has taken one of the most time-consuming parts of the battery recycling process and made it fast, safe, and energy-efficient to boot — an innovation that surely has the potential to help accelerate battery recycling across Europe and beyond.

It’s certainly a technological and business coup for Bosch Rexroth, but that was far from Sebastian Krieger’s main motivation. “My primary concern has always been sustainability, and how we can use technology to help create closed-loop systems. The extraction and refining of raw materials, as well as cell production, can have severe environmental effects, as can the disposal of spent batteries. By recycling them, we minimize this, and we take a big step toward establishing a circular economy for the mobility of the future.”