Environmental Cost of Hybrids' Battery Recycling?

LostMyBeaver writes "I have been considering the purchase of an electric or hybrid vehicle for some time. The biggest problem I have currently is that both technologies make use of rechargable batteries. The same tree-huggers telling me gasoline is bad are telling me that batteries are bad too. I'm only partially knowledgable in this area, but it appears the battery technologies are generally based at least on lithium ion, nickel metal hydride, lead acid and nickel-cadmium. I was hoping someone on Slashdot would be knowledgable enough to explain the environmental cost of recycling these batteries. If I understand correctly, after these chemicals are 'spent' so the cells no longer maintain a charge, they are not useful for producing new batteries. I can only imagine that the most common method of recycling the cells is to store the toxic chemicals of the batteries in barrels and refilling the cells with new chemicals. This sounds like an environmental disaster to me. Is there someone here that can help me sleep better at night by explaining what really happens?"

Google Much?

Stolen from Hybridcars.com:

How often do hybrid batteries need replacing? Is replacement expensive and disposal an environmental problem?

The hybrid battery packs are designed to last for the lifetime of the vehicle, somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000 miles, probably a whole lot longer. The warranty covers the batteries for between eight and ten years, depending on the carmaker.

Battery toxicity is a concern, although today's hybrids use NiMH batteries, not the environmentally problematic rechargeable nickel cadmium. "Nickel metal hydride batteries are benign. They can be fully recycled," says Ron Cogan, editor of the Green Car Journal. Toyota and Honda say that they will recycle dead batteries and that disposal will pose no toxic hazards. Toyota puts a phone number on each battery, and they pay a $200 "bounty" for each battery to help ensure that it will be properly recycled.

There's no definitive word on replacement costs because they are almost never replaced. According to Toyota, since the Prius first went on sale in 2000, they have not replaced a single battery for wear and tear.

Re:$200 bounty

Great. So now we'll have to worry about people tearing open the backs of our cars to remove our _perfectly good, multi-thousand-dollar_ battery packs to sell them for $200 to feed their addictions (heroin, alcohol, food, gasoline, etc.).

Re:$200 bounty

Umm *pause for twitching*, where do you park?

Re:mufflers

Are you thinking of catalytic converts? Mufflers generally are not made from things other than stainless steel, steel and aluminum. CCs, on the other hand, have expensive internals.

Re:$200 bounty

You forgot 8" floppy disks... Can't... Have... Enough....

Re:$200 bounty

Thankfully, those batteries are heavy, and located in hard to reach places. The batteries in the latest Prius weigh 45 Kgs and are located in the trunk of the car, partially underneath the back seat.

I don't see anyone spending a good 30 minutes tearing open the Prius with powertools, only to run around with a 100+lb weight. At that point, they might as well steal the entire car.

Car's Battery

As a Prius owner, let me assuage your concerns. There are two batteries in the Prius: the main hybrid battery that provides the power to move the car and a standard 12-volt battery that is used for starting the vehicle, running the radio, and all of the other things you would expect from a normal car battery.

The former has no user-serviceable parts and can kill you if you're careless. The harder to access in this case the better. The latter is easily accessible from the trunk and can be used with standard jumper cables to start someone else's car or similar functions.

If the main hybrid battery needs replacement, you sure as hell don't want to do it yourself. That thing is 330 volts, 6.5 amps, and a hell of lot bigger/heavier than a standard car battery.

Re:Car's Battery

... you sure as hell don't want to do it yourself. That thing is 330 volts, 6.5 amps, and a hell of lot bigger/heavier than a standard car battery.

pussy

Re:Ownership

I'm paranoid about theft, so I always take my battery with me when I park. Solves both problems.

Re:Ownership

Both problems? All three. If you can carry a Prius battery around, you're not going to get mugged.

Re:Google Much?

With the rising price of metals, the Nickel content alone will guarantee that no one will dump these by the side of the road (btw that would also apply to the NiCd kind). The automotive industry traditionally has been very good to reclaim every last bit that has value, even if it's only pennies. And the batteries will probably have in the 10 - 100 dollar worth of raw material in them.

Re:Google Much?

Actually, the life of your rechargeable batteries relies mostly on your charger. Cheap trickle chargers dump energy into your batteries even after they are full, cutting their life expectancies. Expensive battery chargers detect when the batteries are full and stop placing more energy on the cells. If your batteries are ever warm from charging, you just lost battery life. NiMH can be recharged more often then NiCd, but have less capacity too.

Re:Google Much?

There are a ton of variables that determine battery life, but to say that it relies mostly on your charger is not true when even the most basic charger these days uses peak detection and thermal monitoring to stop charging.

NiMH batteries will _always_ get warm when charging at a decent rate (and most cells like to be charged at a rate somewhere between C/2 and C to get reliable peak detection), because charging them is only 70-80% efficient. The rest goes into heat. If you continue pumping current into them after full, then yes, they heat up quickly.

NiCd batteries only heat up significantly when you continue to charge them after they are full, or you charge them at very high currents.

The #1 killer of typical batteries is letting them sit around dead or pushing them into reverse voltage by draining a pack too far. They like to be stored with at least some charge in them, but too often they end up sitting around for a year or two in between uses and too often they end up sitting dead which kills them. Lithium based cells are so bad that if you drain them completely, you can not revive them, so they typically have a small circuit on them which monitors cell voltage and disables the cell when too low.

There is a ton of information on proper care of batteries including charging here at BatteryUniversity.com [batteryuniversity.com] including information on what types of behaviour kills certain types of cells the fastest.

Hogwash

I've got a first-gen Prius, bought in 2000. While I've had to replace the 12V standard car batter, the main hybrid battery's fine. As there are no Priuses substantially older than mine, I'd say that I'm a good example, as are the friends who have the exact same model let alone the later models.

Re:Sounds good...

And fat friars are made of delicious, delicious monkflesh.

Toyota Claims It Can Recycle The Whole Battery

Toyota claims that [hybridcars.com]

"Nickel metal hydride batteries are benign. They can be fully recycled," says Ron Cogan, editor of the Green Car Journal. Toyota and Honda say that they will recycle dead batteries and that disposal will pose no toxic hazards. Toyota puts a phone number on each battery, and they pay a $200 "bounty" for each battery to help ensure that it will be properly recycled.

Radioactive Batteries

The DOOZY I heard the other day from a mechanic, who I believe is afraid his job is disappearing, is that batteries in the Prius are RADIOACTIVE!

Re:Radioactive Batteries

Time to find a new mechanic. Anybody that would try to spread that load of horseshit is likely to have no problem charging you for refilling your muffler fluid and changing your starter belt.

Re:Radioactive Batteries

According to my mechanic, now that muffler fluid and blinker fluid are the same, the cost to replace has come down at least 10%. He says they are still working on making cheaper muffler bearings however.

Clearly you know nothing...

It's the muffler bearings that need periodic replacement, and the *blinker" fluid that needs to be replenished from time to time.

Both products can be found here;
http://kalecoauto.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=10 [kalecoauto.com]
http://kalecoauto.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=2&products_id=6 [kalecoauto.com]

It really depends on many factors

Caveat - I used to work for Tek Cominco, and have smelted alloys, been a power engineer, and so on.

First, you have to think of the entire life cycle of both production, shipping, usage, and disposal.

Production: depending on the battery used (and there are multiple types being looked at), it may be produced from minerals from say Ontario or BC - in which case it was processed using a combination of methods, some of which use hydroelectric power (green). Acids are used in all metal production pretty much, so you pushing a giant truck down the road involves more acid than the batteries for a plug-in-hybrid which quite frankly has less mass. Smelting frequently uses coal, of course, so it depends on the source and composition of the coal - high-sulfur high-pollution like in China or low-sulfur low-pollution like in Canada. It is NEVER no pollution.

Shipping - again, the parts and batteries will be shipped on a boat using dirty bunker fuel (even in clean ports like LA they only use clean fuel when near the port, a small infinitesimal fraction of fuel usage).

Operation - if you rarely use a car and it just sits there, then your negative pollution cost of operation for batteries is higher - but your pollution of roadways from diesel/gas would be higher still - if you use it a lot it depends on the power source - if hydro, wind, solar and especially if time-shifted so it charges when power demand is low it has lower impact. If you live in a place where electricity comes from coal it's dirtier.

Recycling - if it is - and it will, these are expensive batteries - recycled, the cost of mining and production of the batteries is vastly reduced (anywhere from half to one-twentieth the pollution of getting it again). This is why we recycle scrap from cars and cans, it's cheaper than mining the minerals again.

In general, all things being equal, with typical usage, you will ALWAYS create less pollution with a plug-in-hybrid than with a non-hybrid.

ALWAYS.

Don't confuse battery warranty life with operational battery life, by the way.

Interesting.

What we all need to understand is regardless of the technology we use, we will always leave some sort of pollution and some sort environmental impact. The answers we should be looking for is how to minimize them; which is stated in the parent's post, and not to discard any technology because it's not perfect. Because if we sit around looking for the no-impact, no-footprint, no environmental harm solution, we'll just sit here burning our fossil fuels eventually doing more harm in the long run than we would ever have done by trying some other technologies.

I'm for a portfolio of changes. Meaning, not one silver bullet (nuclear, wind, solar, geo, tidal, fat people on Stair Masters, etc...), but for the use of all - smartly of course. Just because a technology doesn't make sense now doesn't mean it won't in the future.

Battery life cycle

Not only do these batteries last a long time, due to careful maintenance by the car's computer and optimization of charge/discharge patterns, they are fully recyclable and less poisonous when compared to lead batteries.

Most people believe the lifecycle of a battery dies when the car is totaled. Not true. Batteries are being salvaged and sold on ebay to continue their services past the totaling of the car. There has also been progress of mixing n matching individual modules within battery packs, to further extend the usefulness of each part of the battery. Hybrid car batteries are made up of many modules. When the battery fails, its only one or two modules that fail, and can be replaced with other modules that have the same charge/discharge characteristics.

These dead modules can then be sent to Toyota to be recycled, the nickel extracted and re-used in new batteries.

How Tesla's Lithium Batteries are Recycled

Others have already given a good idea of how NiMH batteries are recycled (and how they are relatively benign if not), here is how Tesla is planning on recycling Lithium batteries used in their electric cars when it comes time to replace them:

Mythbusters Part 3: Recycling our Non-Toxic Battery Packs [teslamotors.com]

While NiMH batteries are what's used in just about all hybrid vehicles on the road today, the industry is slowly moving towards as the advantages of Lithium based batteries (higher power to weight ratio, higher power density) outweighs their drawbacks (high cost), and higher energy density is required to make plug-in and pure electric vehicles usable.

Bad study.

You do realize that the source study (http://cnwmr.com/nss-folder/automotiveenergy/)has been thoroughly debunked in the same Slashdot discussion that you linked to? If you troll, at least put some effort into it.