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REUSE, DON’T DIG UP
A STANFORD UNIVERSITY REPORT SAYS “Recycling Lithium-ion Batteries Delivers Significant Environment Benefits” compared with mining and processing new materials.
“On a large scale,” Stanford researchers write, “recycling could also help relieve the long-term insecurity—physical and geopolitically—of critical battery minerals.”
Here are tidbits gleaned from the Stanford paper published in Nature Communications, January 24, 2025; its StanfordReport news release, January 31, 2025; and my usual Internet sleuthing.
A Critical Question. Scrap materials from battery manufacturers and so-called “dead” batteries are rich sources of lithium, cobalt, copper, manganese, and aluminum. The critical question is which is better for the environment: Mining for these elements to provide stock for new batteries? Or recycling materials already in batteries that are no longer useful?
Scrap or Dead? The researchers note that dead battery recycling “emits less than half the greenhouse gases (GHGs) of conventional mining and refinement of these metals and uses about one-fourth of the water and energy of mining new metals.”
What’s more, their research found, “The environmental benefits are even greater for the scrap stream, which comprised about 90% of the recycled supply studied, coming in at: 19% of the GHG emissions of mining and processing, 12% of the water use, and 11% of the energy use.”
Location Matters. Battery recycling’s environmental impacts depend heavily on the processing facility’s location and electricity source: “A battery recycling plant in regions that rely heavily on electricity generated by burning coal would see a diminished climate advantage,” said Samantha Bunke, a PhD student at Stanford and one of the study’s three lead investigators. “On the other hand, fresh-water shortages in regions with cleaner electricity are a great concern,” she found.
The report recounts, “In the mining and processing of cobalt, for example, 80% of the global supply is mined in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Then, 75% of the cobalt supply for batteries travels by road, rail, and sea to China for refining.”
These geopolitical facts surely stress another aspect of the location matter.
“Meanwhile,” the report continues, “most of the global supply of lithium is mined in Australia and Chile. Most of that supply also makes its way to China. The equivalent process for battery recycling is collecting used batteries and scrap, which must then be transported to the recycler.”
Mileage Adds Up. Researchers determined that the total transportation for conventional mining and refining of the active metals averages about 35,000 miles.
By contrast, used batteries from a cell phone or an EV to a hypothetical recycling facility in California travel only around 140 miles. This, of course, is another bit of data stressing the advantages of recycling.
Academia/Industry Cooperation. Stanford notes, “This study is the first known lifecycle analysis of lithium-ion battery recycling based on data from an industrial-scale recycling facility. “We are grateful for the data supplied by Redwood Materials from the largest industrial-scale lithium-ion battery recycling facility in North America, which was needed for this research,” said senior author William Tarpeh.
The report recounts, “Redwood, which has since broken ground on a new facility in South Carolina, was one of the first to apply the lessons of this project to their own operations and environmental footprint. Said company founder and chief executive, JB Straubel: ‘The insights of this research have played a key role in refining Redwood’s battery recycling processes.’ Straubel earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees from Stanford.”
Image from Redwood Materials, Tahoe, Nevada, and outside Charleston, South Carolina (the latter, under development).
Recycling: Lithium-ion Versus Lead-Acid. Conventional motoring, of course, depends on conventional lead-acid energy storage. The report notes an interesting fact in this regard: “While the U.S. now recycles about 50% of available lithium-ion batteries, it has successfully recycled 99% of lead-acid batteries for decades. “Given that used lithium-ion batteries contain materials with up to 10 times higher economic value, the opportunity is significant,” Tarpeh said.
Looking Ahead. The report notes, “Industrial-scale battery recycling is growing, but not quickly enough. Tarpeh predicts, “We’re forecast to run out of new cobalt, nickel, and lithium in the next decade. We’ll probably just mine lower-grade minerals for a while, but 2050 and the goals we have for that year are not far away.” ds
© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2025
Simanaitis Says 
You’re singing the right song, Dennis, but to an empty auditorium. Even with most cities collecting recyclables and trash separately, many are finding the sorting too difficult/expensive, and all is winding up in the same landfills.
Not only do we have to get communities and governments to live up to their promises, our citizenry cannot be bothered … even when places like schools, offices and hospitals have a line of receptacles clearly marked and colored for glass, metal, paper, plastic the facilities people have to sort it by hand to remove wrong items. We need a complete change in cultural values: citizens and civil governments.
While our electronic players, computers, etc. are full of valuable items, including gold, virtually no cities consider them worth recycling, even charging significant fees for disposal. Private groups collect them at refuse centers, crush and ship the electronics off shore where they’re sorted and cycled into products sold back to us.
During the Depression and especially in WWII we were conditioned to value and recycle scrap. Now, it’s just too much trouble in our selfish society. Few will be bothered to keep a dead remote battery and deliver it to a recycle collector … if they could find one.
Yet thieves will strip an empty house of copper pipes, a/c condensers and even rob parks of bronze/brass plaques and statues. DC had a statue stolen of Fredrick Douglas, Wichita lost a Jackie Robinson statue and KC just had a native American hunter sawed off at the ankles.
Well, personally, I do recycle a lot of that stuff. The avenues to do so exist, especially in California. But yes, you have to do some personal work sorting things into the right bins and labeling boxes for the city (or other) e-waste, hazmat, etc collectors.
As for the Big Noise – EV battery recycling, the main issue so far is that not enough of them have been sold and wrecked/worn out to support a viable recycling stream, yet at least. So the recycling companies like Redwood are surviving on the stuff that hits bottom sooner like laptop & phone batteries, and that flow of little lithiums like coin cells. I suspect that the relatively low recycling rate (50% for Li vs nearly 100% for lead-acid car batteries) includes all that small stuff, much of which is too much trouble to collect and transport for people used to a disposable lifecycle. For that matter, even the once-through batteries, non-rechargeable, probably have recoverable materials. California requires that they be recycled – illegal to any battery in the trash, actually, but good luck enforcing that for the small stuff.
Good for you Mike, and for the record, I do too … have been doing so since youth, and just turned 80. Environmentalism has been practiced in the US since the beginning, especially on farms, and seems to have disappeared in urban culture.
I recall keeping a coffee can on the kitchen counter to collect bacon grease for WWII munitions, and we can’t keep a small plastic jar under the sink for dead batteries … I do! My city doesn’t recycle glass, but I keep a 5 gallon bucket on the back porch for the occasional jar or bottle, and take it to Ripple Glass a mile away who makes a profit on it.
Our youth is being taught in school to whine and march for the environment, but not the details of how to do it themselves?
Why not battery, glass, even cork barrels at schools to set the example? As a Cub and Boy Scout, we used to take a truck, even our Radio Flyer wagons through neighborhoods and collect cans, bottles and newspapers for return deposit or recycling to make money for our camping trips.
In the summer, black bins are picked up every two weeks, green bins weekly and blue bags weekly. In the winter the green bins and black alternate weekly. As the biodegradable kitchen bags tend to leak a little I have had kitchen waste leak and then freeze to the bottom of the bin, which is a little frustrating, but as long as it is frozen it doesn’t smell too much.
The city also has several recycling centres where various types of waste or large recyclable items can be dropped off, including battery and electronics recycling. One of those centres isn’t too far from my home.
As to bottles (plastic and glass) and tins, there is an organization for individuals with diverse abilities as their website describes it, that comes around and collects them every two months and so we just bag them up and keep them in a corner of the garage. At the end of the year we get a tax receipt for donation in kind.
There also is an electronics recycling association that takes older computer hardware for a tax receipt, but they are rather disorganized and after the last time about a year ago I have stopped dealing with them. I have also donated older but still functional hardware to volunteer groups/schools.
I also have a lady who sells stuff for us on Kijiji an eBay subsidiary in Canada. She takes about 30% commission, but saves us the hassle of trying to sell items, and means that we don’t have to deal with tire kickers scoping out our home.