Cotton: Smelting is already among the top 10 most pollutive global industries
Steve Cotton · The right way to recycle batteries [partner content] · Mar 5, 2024 · at 19:43
AquaMetals CEO Steve Cotton warns about the environmental hazards of scaling conventional pyrometallurgical smelting to recycle electric vehicle and energy storage batteries.
0:00 / 0:07exact quote · 7.9s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“And that will create what is already one of the top 10 most pollutive industries in the world smelting times 10.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Steve Cotton
Cotton: Recycled lithium content will reach 80% to 90% in decades
“More and more recycling infrastructure gets built. We get closer and closer and migrate from that less than one percent to 80 to 90%, just like what lead has shown us. And it's really only a couple decades of recycling, so it'll happen fairly quickly.”
Cotton: Traditional battery smelters are dangerous, unsafe hellscapes
“You know, having the desire to understand, well, what happens to these batteries, I went to smelters, and they're a hellscape. It's very dangerous. You've got lead dust all over the floor. You've got a bunch of people wearing hot suits literally chucking batte…”
Cotton: Processes generating more waste than recovered material aren't true recycling
“When you produce many multiples more waste and pollution than the valuable materials that are recovered, is it really even recycling is the way we look at it.”
Cotton: Global Battery Recycling Market Will Reach $25 Billion by 2030
“And if you look at the global lithium battery recycling market, it's already today roughly a five billion dollar industry, And we expect it to grow by about five-fold just in the coming few years to the end of the decade to nearly twenty-five billion dollars.”
Cotton: Under 1% of materials in new lithium batteries are recycled
“And if you contrast that today to a new lithium battery that you get regardless of the application, whether it's an EV or a piece of consumer electronics, et cetera that has under one percent of the recycled lithium, nickel, or cobalt in that new battery. It a…”
Cotton: Pyrometallurgy burns or loses lithium into unrecoverable slag
“That really is high temperature, fossil fuels based and it doesn't recover all the materials. For example, in lithium recycling you burn the lithium or you lose what lithium you don't burn into what's called slag, which is a solid waste stream that you can't r…”