Cobat, the national collection and recycling consortium, is aiming for the complete reconversion of electric cars — including lithium batteries, destined for sustainable disposal or reuse in other applications.
How will we dispose of the spent batteries from electric vehicles? The great question that will define the mobility of the future is anything but distant, given that in 2020, according to estimates from Unrae, the association of foreign car manufacturers operating in Italy, almost 11,000 zero-emission vehicles are expected to be registered in our country. The need to reduce the environmental impact of spent batteries will become increasingly urgent in the years ahead and will demand clear answers. Answers that Cobat, the national collection and recycling consortium, will soon be in a position to provide.
The electric revolution must not and cannot turn into an environmental boomerang. To avert this risk — stemming from the difficulties of disposing of end-of-life lithium batteries — Cobat proposes two solutions that are as effective as they are complex to implement: recycling and reuse. While lead batteries present no particular disposal difficulties, the picture becomes considerably more complex when lithium cells are considered — the technology underpinning the performance of the latest generation of electric vehicles. On this point, the alarm is raised by Giancarlo Morandi, president of Cobat, who stresses that, to date, "the thousands of spent lithium batteries from smartphones are not being recycled at all. Alarmingly, they are disposed of in dedicated incinerators in France and Belgium. We cannot allow the same to happen with the batteries of zero-emission vehicles, which are enormously larger and more complex."
The challenge set by Cobat goes well beyond the simple disposal of electric car batteries. The consortium has its sights set on the complete recycling of vehicles, encompassing every component. This includes lithium cells which, specifically, before final decommissioning could be assigned to other functions outside the mobility context — for example, for storing energy produced from renewable sources. While their residual capacity for charge release and storage is lower than that of cells intended for automotive use, they can nonetheless play an important role in the storage sector, making it possible to reduce global lithium demand and, consequently, extraction activity. In doing so, the environmental cost of electric mobility would be reduced still further.
As for final disposal, Cobat is on the verge of announcing, in collaboration with the Cnr (National Research Council), the definition of an effective process for the complete recycling of lithium batteries — recovering all components, metals included, so as to drastically reduce their environmental impact. A new horizon that promises to "safeguard" the sustainability of the electric car. The future, now more than ever, runs on batteries.