Stay up to date with our Up First newsletter, sent every weekday morning.On a sweltering morning in early July, Thomas Andrade, the co-owner of Everett Auto Parts in Massachusetts, supervises as a team of workers carefully straps two Chevy Volt hybrid batteries to a pallet, ready to ship out for recycling.Selling off valuable bits and pieces of a vehicle is, fundamentally, how a salvage yard makes money.And these batteries are, in fact, full of valuable minerals: nickel and cobalt and manganese and lithium.
They're headed to a battery recycler who will shred them into a fine, dark powder called black mass, from which those minerals can be recovered and reused in new batteries.So how much will Andrade make off this particular deal?Zilch. And he's pretty happy with that."The good thing with these is, they'll at least take them at no expense," he says of the battery recycler.The fact that Andrade is quite pleased to make no money at all points to a problem for the vehicle recycling industry — and for society at large.It's extremely important that EV batteries get recycled.If they're treated like trash, they become hazardous waste due to the risk of toxic leaching or dangerous fires.
Treating them like waste is also, well, a waste: It squanders minerals that could be reused.Recycling battery minerals, the better option, reduces the climate footprint of new vehicle production and eases U.S.reliance on China for those critical minerals.
In the best case scenario, it also makes money for everyone involved.But in many cases, the math for EV battery recycling is not penciling out.That's leaving salvage yards stuck with old batteries nobody wants, not even recyclers.As Andrade is packing up those T-shaped Chevy Volt batteries, across the state at Westover Salvage Yard, CEO Brian Bachand is staring at another EV battery.
This one is a mattress-sized Tesla battery, sitting on a shelf.It, too, is hypothetically valuable.It still works just fine.
If a Tesla driver wants t...