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Date: January 29, 2024
You might see more electric vehicles on Broomfield roads today due to their popularity with owners lowering their refueling costs and maintenance expenses. Just like the battery in your remote control, EV batteries will wear out over time.
What happens to old electric car batteries? Like engine oil and tires, our service technicians can’t just throw batteries into a trash dumpster. The metals in the batteries, not to mention the liquid, can contaminate groundwater. The current solution for EV battery disposal comes from several recycling facilities that keep these items out of ordinary landfills.
Find out everything you need to know about electric car battery recycling from the team at Land Rover Denver near Aurora. You’ll find out about what happens to old electric car batteries once our service team takes out the old one and gives your vehicle a new jolt of power.
All automakers must offer an EV battery warranty of eight years or 100,000 miles, whichever comes first, per the federal government. But all electric vehicle batteries have a shelf life. They’re considered inefficient when they drop to 70 to 75% of full capacity, which can happen in 15 to 20 years, depending on the conditions of the battery as it charges and discharges.
When it’s time for EV battery disposal, our service center near Westminster swaps the old hybrid or EV battery for a new one. Then, we ship it to an electric car battery recycling center where it undergoes a specific process for recycling.
EV batteries have copper, steel, and aluminum in their shells and wires. These metals can go to metals recycling smelters where they are melted down and then put into other metal parts.
The battery cells themselves, inside the tough outer shell, need more extensive processes to recycle them. The cells contain other, rarer metals like lithium, cobalt, manganese, and nickel. These metals are repurposed into new EV batteries through a special process.
Recycling centers will ship these metals to EV battery manufacturing facilities to go into new batteries all over again. The cycle will continue with each better. The beauty of EV battery disposal is that it reduces manufacturing costs and reliance on new materials from mines while lowering the amount of pollution needed to ship new metals to manufacturing plants.
Some metals, like cobalt and manganese, are expensive to mine and harder to obtain than copper, steel, or aluminum. Getting these recycled metals can alleviate supply chain issues that could occur through geopolitical or economic forces in foreign countries and beyond our control. As such, electric car battery recycling can give battery manufacturers a more reliable supply of metals for new cells.
The environment also plays an important role here. Automakers plan to expand production of EVs in the late 2020s and early 2030s. Manufacturers will need more of these materials to keep up with the demand for EV batteries. Responsible EV battery disposal should reduce carbon emissions for these processes, which is the overall goal of electric vehicles in the first place.
When it’s time for EV battery disposal, many of these batteries can still store 20 to 90 kWh of power in their cells. These batteries offer the perfect storage for home electricity! Specialized companies can turn a series of EV batteries into packs of multiple EV batteries strung together. These batteries can store and provide power for homes for many hours, such as when the power goes out or solar or wind power is unavailable. Home storage batteries, repurposed from EV battery disposal, could have cells that last up to 10 years!
Ready for a luxury, rugged, yet fuel-efficient new vehicle? Contact us or call (855) 419-1178 to schedule a test drive with our team near Westminster. We think you’ll love one of these EVs or hybrids in your Littleton garage!
