The U.S. Department of Energy recently distributed $74 million from the recently enacted Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act to advance the reuse of batteries. Of that, $16 million went to a pair of San Diego area research groups. UC San Diego will receive $10 million to develop and scale up technology that recycles lithium-ion batteries. Smartville Inc. of Carlsbad has been awarded a $6 million grant to extend battery use for energy storage systems.
Zheng Chen, who leads the UC San Diego battery research team, said finding second lives for batteries is crucial. “Today’s batteries, especially those used in electronics, are not actually recycled,” Chen said in an email to the Union-Tribune. “They might be collected but they are largely landfilled or not treated properly to recover their value and mitigate environmental impact.”
Lithium-ion batteries dominate the markets for portable electronic devices, electric vehicles and energy storage systems. But there’s a finite amount of lithium that can be extracted around the globe and its costs have increased 13-fold in the past two years, according to mining experts. The UC San Diego project looks to recycle lithium-ion batteries through a process the lab calls Purification-Regeneration Integrated Materials Engineering, or PRIME. The novel technology takes critical cathode material from spent batteries as well as scraps from the manufacturing process and returns it to the production line.