Electric-Car Batteries: What Happens To Them After Coming Out Of The Car?

It's one of the recurring questions asked by electric-car skeptics: Yeah, but what about all those battery packs? Won't they just end up in landfills?

We know already that the 12-Volt lead-acid car battery appears to be the most-recycled consumer good in the world--though that's largely for safety reasons, as lead is far more toxic than the materials in lithium-ion batteries.

More recently, hybrid car-makers have had programs to take back and safely dispose of used or damaged high-voltage battery packs for 15 years. Those nickel-metal-hydride cells contain precious metals with a known recycling value.

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But for the much higher-capacity lithium-ion batteries used in electric cars, the answers may be slightly different.

A new report from the Mineta Transportation Institute at San Jose State University in California suggests that 20 years hence, there may be 1.3 million to 6.7 million used battery packs from electric cars.

According to the report, as covered in Recycling International (via ChargedEVs), roughly 85 percent of those could be suitable for "post-vehicle use," with the remaining 15 percent likely damaged beyond repair.

There may not be a business model in recycling them, however: The materials in a lithium-ion battery pack are relatively inexpensive, and even with technological breakthroughs, the report estimates that only 20 percent of the cost of recycling could be recouped by selling the recovered materials.

Instead, the value will lie in secondary uses--depending, of course, on what value the market assigns to a used pack.

The report suggests that while this area is "less well-defined," repurposing the packs for other uses could be economical at a cost of $83 to $114 per kilowatt-hour.