How environmentally friendly is it to recycle a battery?
Mining the raw materials to make electric vehicle batteries can have a negative impact to the environment in terms of energy and water consumption, but is recovering the raw materials from used batteries less harmful?
New research from Aalto University in Finland suggests that current practices to extract raw materials from batteries have a 38% smaller carbon footprint than mining these materials from the ground. Still, the research points to improvements that could be made to the recycling process to reduce the carbon footprint even further.