Renault will pave the way.
Renalt focuses on recycling electric car batteries. Here is the electric Scenic model that was launched at the IAA fair in Munich last autumn.
Camera Stein Jarle Olsen / Tek.no
Renault has ambitions to become the first European car manufacturer to be able to recycle electric car batteries on an industrial scale, reports Reuters.
– In Europe, at present… no one can claim to recycle used batteries in a closed circuit to reproduce nickel, cobalt and lithium to make new batteries, says Jean-Philippe Bahuaud, head of Renault’s “The Future is Neutral” department (TFIN), to the news agency.
Renault will be in advanced talks with potential partners to get the new business area up and running. Recycling batteries could potentially be a route to cheaper electric cars.
The metals used often make up 70 percent of the cost of a battery, and the batteries can account for 40 percent of the price of a car, according to Reuters.
An important element is also that the European car industry wants to make itself less dependent on China, which has traditionally been responsible for large parts of the extraction, but not least for the processing of these rare earth metals. In practice, it has almost led to a kind of monopoly.
Renault’s Flins factory, located in Aubergenville outside Paris, will switch to producing recycled car components.
Camera Christophe Ena / AP / NTB
Turn recycling into business
Renault says it will stop production of new vehicles at its Flins plant just west of Paris, and instead switch to the production of partly recycled car components and refurbished cars.
Bahuaud tells Reuters that it expects to produce 9,000 repaired batteries this year, and that these – and other “reconditioned” parts – are sold at a 30 percent discount compared to new products.
The company has a goal that the TFIN department will be responsible for sales of 2.3 billion euros (almost NOK 27 billion) before the end of the decade, with an operating margin of over ten percent.
Makes it easier to recycle
Of the competitors, it is perhaps Polestar (albeit Chinese-owned) that has been most vocal about the need for easier recycling of car components.
For example, they have talked a lot about so-called “monomaterials”, which can be recycled directly without having to go through time- and energy-consuming processes to break them down into their various components.
The company also labels various components with, for example, the exact type of aluminum used, precisely to facilitate future recycling – also for batteries.
The Polestar 6 concept mostly features interior materials that are made from one type of thermoplastic that can be easily recycled.
Camera Stein Jarle Olsen, Tek.no
Norwegian factory
In Norway, we also have companies such as Hydrovolt, which is a joint venture between Norwegian Hydro and the Swedish battery manufacturer Northvolt. They run what will be one of Europe’s largest factories for recycling electric car batteries in Fredrikstad.
Here, both aluminum and so-called black mass, which contains lithium, magnesium, nickel and cobalt, are recovered. In February, Hydrovolt announced that it had entered into an agreement with Fortum to send black pulp to Fortum’s battery recycling facility in Harjavalta in Finland for further processing.
The company Freyr also had big plans for Norwegian battery production, more precisely in Mo i Rana, but has chosen to put these plans on hold thanks to better framework conditions in the USA for the time being.
This is how it looked before the opening of Hydrovolt’s battery recycling factory in Fredrikstad in 2021. In the first instance, it was stated that around 8,000 tonnes of battery modules could be recycled here per year.
Camera Gisle Oddstad / VG
