Do you have old mobile phones piling up in your desk drawer and you don’t know what to do with them? A new US initiative aims to make it easier to recycle mobile phones, computers and other battery-powered electronics.
This month, the U.S. Department of Energy $14 million program The project will fund more than 1,000 consumer battery collection locations across the country at Staples and Batteries Plus stores, part of a larger $62 million effort. The Biden administration announced this in April. To promote battery recycling.
The average lifespan of a smartphone is only 2-3 years, Billions of mobile phones are discarded each year There is a serious and growing e-waste problem all over the world.
Your smartphone should not be disposed of in your household waste or recycling bin as it contains a lithium-ion battery which, if damaged, punctured or exposed to excessive heat, can leak toxic chemicals into the environment or cause a dangerous fire.
Improper battery disposal is not just an environmental issue. The U.S. Department of Energy sees it as an economic issue as well. Many rechargeable batteries contain critical materials, including lithium, nickel, cobalt, graphite, and manganese, that are essential to the manufacture of clean energy technologies like wind turbines and electric vehicles. As electric vehicle sales grow in the U.S., more of these materials will be needed.
“Up until now China has had a near monopoly on the processing of those materials and in many cases even the extraction of those materials,” U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm told WIRED in an interview. “We want to be able to create multiple ways to access those critical materials in the United States, and recycling is one piece of that.” She added that U.S. battery recycling capacity is “grossly underutilized.”
When you throw away a battery, the materials cannot be recovered. Recycling allows these resources to be reused over and over again, and studies have shown that recycled battery materials function just as well as new ones.
“What we don’t want is for critical minerals to disappear from the supply chain,” says MIT chemical engineering professor Martin Bazant, who directs the Battery Sustainability Center, a joint project between MIT and Northeastern University. “We have to be able to recycle them.”
Basant says it makes sense for the government to work with retailers that sell appliances and batteries to increase collection of these materials—”these companies are well-known,” he says—but he acknowledges it can be difficult to get people to recognize not only the importance of saving these materials, but also the damage they do to the environment if they’re not disposed of properly.
Even if collection facilities work, the question of who will process the batteries remains, says Doug Cobbold, executive director of the California Product Stewardship Council, which has sponsored a battery recycling bill. The problem, he says, is that extracting key materials from recycled batteries is complicated and expensive. In fact, processing these materials can be more expensive than mining them anew. And lithium is particularly dangerous to handle because it’s so reactive. Only about 5% of lithium-ion batteries are thought to be recycled. According to the American Chemical Society.
“Any facility that’s processing these things is doing so at a cost,” Cobbold said, “and they have to figure out how to cover the cost of processing.”
California funds recycling by adding a visible fee to certain electronics, similar to how states prepay a tire-recycling fee when they buy new tires. “Supporting other states’ collection networks can still be problematic, because once they’re taken in, who pays for the disposal?” Cobbold says.
Scientists are researching ways to recycle lithium-ion batteries more sustainably and cost-effectively, but it could be years before the methods are profitable.
James Tour, a chemist at Rice University who studies battery recycling methods, says one way the US could improve its battery recycling ecosystem is for new regulations to standardize battery design, which would help make the process more efficient. “These metals are infinitely recyclable,” Tour says. “We just need better designs that make them easier to put into batteries.”
Items that will be collected at the new site include rechargeable batteries, mobile phones, laptops, vacuum cleaners and smartwatches. EV batteries will not be accepted.
