While electric vehicles make up a larger share of the new cars on roads every year, helping to decrease the total amount of air pollution, a significant problem has lingered until recently: EV battery waste.
Now, as companies like Redwood Materials say they can recycle around 95% of EV battery materials, Cambridge researchers have developed an innovative technology to use acid from discarded EV batteries to aid in the recycling of another difficult-to-reuse material in plastic, per Interesting Engineering.
What's happening?
A Cambridge University team of scientists has created a solar-powered system that takes spent EV battery acid and uses it to treat waste plastics, creating industrially useful chemicals.
Through this new process, multiple waste streams could see efficiency improvements, all while creating valuable byproducts, such as acetic acid and hydrogen. Hydrogen has specifically been studied as a potential fuel source that could reduce levels of air pollution that are responsible for worsening extreme weather.
The newly designed process is called solar-powered acid photoreforming. And while still a novel approach, it shows exciting potential in our ability to reduce the amount of plastic that makes its way into our environment, while addressing issues with EV battery waste.
Usually, the acid found in EV batteries requires neutralization, creating even more waste. However, through this new process the hazardous byproduct gains a beneficial second use.
Laboratory tests by the Cambridge team found that the acid photoreforming process surprisingly produced high yields of hydrogen, making the system potentially more profitable.
Why do we need recycling innovation?
This new technology is desperately needed as mountains of plastic waste continue to pile up in oceans and landfills. According to the United Nations, human society creates nearly 441 million tons of plastic annually, and even though half of it is designed for reuse, only about a tenth is actually recycled.
And beyond polluting our environment, plastic waste has created countless microplastic particles, whose health effects are still not fully known.
So while issues of plastic pollution and EV battery recycling are far from solved, there are teams of smart researchers who continue to innovate and design clever new methods to address our problems.
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