Recyclability is important in the world of EV battery manufacturing. Since the raw materials like lithium and cobalt that make up battery cathodes are expensive, and mining for them is bad for the environment, automakers want to recycle as much as they can. And Porsche just reached a milestone in its efforts to create a fully end-to-end recycling process, so it can use raw materials from its own old batteries to make new ones.
German company Cylib has been working on this project with Porsche, and they've proven that both the technology and their processes work.
“The pilot project with Porsche demonstrates that our approach is feasible in practice: valuable raw materials from Porsche batteries at the end of their first life can potentially flow back into new high-performance batteries for Porsche vehicles,” Dr. Lilian Schwich, co-CEO and co-Founder of Cylib, said in a release this week.
Creating a process to use recycled materials is just the one part of the project. Working on quality is the other. Porsches ain't cheap. So it can't just slap any sort of battery in its cars and expect its customers to be happy with subpart quality. Customers won't care if their batteries were made with recycled materials if they don't charge quickly or lose much of their initial capacity.
If Porsche can implement this process at a scale large enough to build at least some of the batteries it uses in its production cars, it will make a big difference. Not only does it create a more sustainable material loop that's better for the environment, but it also allows Porsche to rely less on global raw materials supply. Porsche has invested a lot in projects that don't always pan out, like its synthetic E-Fuel. But this one might be incredibly helpful, and it might force other automakers to do the same in the future.
