Abstract
The electric vehicle (EV) revolution is accelerating in the last decade, but it needs urgently an expansive infrastructure and new technological breakthroughs. As trends of the motor manufacturers shifts from fossil fuels to all-electric, visions of a brighter, more optimistic world come into view. The world’s big car manufacturers have realized that EVs is the future. Jaguar plans to sell only electric cars from 2025 and Volvo from 2030. China now has more than 100 electric-car makers, along with hundreds of companies that supply components for EVs. The most crucial and expensive of EV components is the lithium-ion batteries with a tight grip on the global supply of the elements needed to manufacture them in China. In 2020 there were 11 million registered EVs worldwide. It is estimated that by the end of the decade (2030) under governments’ existing energy restrictions, climate policies and vehicular emission reductions, there could be up to 230 million electric vehicles on world’s streets. Inevitably, all big motorcar manufacturers aim at establishing research facilities for recycling EV batteries. Volkswagen in 2021 opened its first recycling plant, in Salzgitter, Germany (for 3,600 battery systems per year), while Renault is recycling all its EV batteries through a consortium with French waste management company Veolia and Belgian chemical firm Solvay. Very quickly the EV battery recycling moves from the fringe to the mainstream of EV battery production. The Global Battery Alliance (GBA), was initiated with support of the World Economic Forum. And the European Battery Alliance (EBA) was established in the same year, 2017, as a bottom-up approach to EU industrial policy. It was recognized from the beginning that the whole value chain of EV batteries – from raw material supplies to battery recycling – was of strategic interest for the EU. Electric vehicles (EVs) could play a major role in mitigating the effect of climate change (decrease CO2 emissions) in addition to an increase to contributing towards a less polluted and efficient transport system. But, the most important challenges facing the EV batteries, compared to the conventional internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles, is how efficient and sustainable will be the recycling and recovering of metals. Progress in this field of EV batteries is advancing very fast despite the major technological problems.
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