(Credit: Redwood Materials)Toyota is testing and recycling its hybrid electric vehicle batteries with Redwood Materials in an effort to expand the use of repurposed and remanufactured batteries.
The partnership will then look to expand the work into other areas such as battery health screening, data management, remanufacturing, and producing battery materials for the North American supply chain. The goal of the effort, Toyota says, is to find ways to incorporate battery recycling through battery materials manufacturing into the automaker’s battery production strategy in North America.
By repurposing battery materials, it can create more sustainable production of batteries and what the company calls a closed-loop ecosystem of its electric vehicle supply chain.
As electric vehicles are more widely utilized, the batteries needed for their operation, their materials, and what to do with them at the end of their use is a growing issue for manufacturers. There are now more than 10 million electric vehicles on the roads worldwide, according to the International Energy Agency, and batteries are estimated to have a lifespan of 10 to 13 years.
Toyota has been active in electric vehicle battery initiatives, including building a $1.29 billion plant in North Carolina. That facility is expected to produce batteries for 1.2 million electric vehicles per year. Overall, Toyota is investing $13.6 billion in battery production through 2030.
Battery recycler Redwood receives more than 6 gigawatts of batteries a year. It then reproduces the anode and cathode materials from the batteries for new battery production. The company plans to increase the production of those components to 100 gigawatt-hours by 2025, which it says is enough to produce more than 1 million electric vehicles each year.
Redwood also has a battery recycling program with Ford and Volvo. That program is initially focused on retrieving batteries in California, where electric vehicle use is among the highest in the country.
Mercedes-Benz is another automaker addressing battery recycling, and it is building a facility in Germany that will have the capacity to recycle 2,500 metric tons of batteries a year and produce materials to build more vehicles. Li-Cycle recently said it would start using an evaporation and crystallization system at its recycling facility in New York to produce nickel sulfate and cobalt sulfate for new batteries.
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