Great news for anyone hoping to buy an electric car in the future and for anyone who cares about our planet: A company that recycles lithium-ion batteries just announced that after a yearlong pilot program, it was able to recover important metals from used batteries at an incredible rate of more than 95%.
The company, Redwood Materials, was founded by JB Straubel, one of the five Tesla co-founders and the company’s former CTO.
Tesla has been slowly moving the world away from transport powered by dirty energy sources and toward electric vehicles. EVs are much less destructive to our planet than gas-powered cars, which release around 5 tons of planet-warming gases per year.
However, one issue with EVs is that their batteries rely on lithium, a chemical that has to be extracted from the Earth via mining. This mining process uses excessive amounts of water and is highly destructive to the surrounding environment.
Though its effects are not as bad as the effects of mining for dirty energy sources like oil and coal, they must be meaningfully addressed in order for EVs to truly be considered environmentally friendly.
Care for the planet??? Has anybody looked at the places the minerals are mined from? Talk about rape of the planet! Plus the children, women with babies strapped to their backs that are essentially slaves that are doing the mining…the mining standards in these countries is ZERO…the “OMG Carbon” weenies need to take a good look at the equipment being used and the amount of so called “fossil fuels” it takes to fuel them…the emissions spewing out are more than my car will ever emit…
This administration would rather invest in China making batteries and solar panels rather than this, which seems to be a great recycling program.