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A very Finnish thing’: Big sand battery to store wind and solar energy using crushed soapstone

Posted on April 2, 2024April 2, 2024 by dishanth

The battery will be able to store a week’s heat demand in winter – how does it work?

A huge sand battery is set to slash the carbon emissions of a Finnish town.

The industrial-scale storage unit in Pornainen, southern Finland, will be the world’s biggest sand battery when it comes online within a year.

Capable of storing 100 MWh of thermal energy from solar and wind sources, it will enable residents to eliminate oil from their district heating network, helping to cut emissions by nearly 70 percent.

“It’s exciting to build a large-scale thermal energy storage, which will also act as a primary production plant in Pornainen’s district heating network,” says Liisa Naskali, COO at Polar Night Energy, the company behind the innovation.

“This is a significant step in scaling up the sand battery technology.”

Sand batteries are getting bigger in Finland

The new 1 MW sand battery has a precursor. In May 2022, Polar Night Energy rigged a smaller design to a power station in Kankaanpää town.

Launched just as Russia cut off gas supplies in retaliation for Finland joining NATO, the project was a timely example of how renewable energy could be harnessed in a new way.

Euronews Green previously spoke to the young Finnish founders, Tommi Eronen and Markku Ylönen, who engineered the technology.

“We were talking about how – if we had the liberty to design a community for ourselves – how could we solve the energy problem in such a confined environment?” Markku said of the inspiration behind Polar Night Energy in 2018.

“Then quite quickly, especially here in the north, you run into the problem of energy storage if you’re trying to produce the energy as cleanly as possible.”

The friends started playing around with ideas, landing on sand as an affordable way to store the plentiful electricity generated when the sun is shining, or the wind blowing at a high rate.

Finding a way to store these variable renewables is the crux of unleashing their full potential. Lithium batteries work well for specific applications, explains Markku, but aside from their environmental issues and expense, they cannot take in a huge amount of energy.

Grains of sand, it turns out, are surprisingly roomy when it comes to energy storage.

The sand battery in Pornainen will be around 10 times larger than the one still in operation at Vatajankoski power plant in Kankaanpää. The start-up also previously connected a pilot plant to the district heating network of Tampere city.

So how do sand batteries work exactly?

It’s quite a simple structure to begin with, Polar Night Energy said of its prototype. A tall tower is filled with low-grade sand and charged up with the heat from excess solar and wind electricity.

This works by a process called resistive heating, whereby heat is generated through the friction created when an electrical current passes through any material that is not a superconductor. The hot air is then circulated in the container through a heat exchanger.

The sand can store heat at around 500C for several days to even months, providing a valuable store of cheaper energy during the winter. When needed, the battery discharges the hot air – warming water in the district heating network. Homes, offices and even the local swimming pool all benefit in Kankaanpää, for example.

“There’s really nothing fancy there,” Markku says of the storage. “The complex part happens on the computer; we need to know how the energy, or heat, moves inside the storage, so that we know all the time how much is available and at what rate we can discharge and charge.”

How will the sand battery serve residents in Pornainen?

Having refined its charging algorithms, Polar Night Energy is now ready to scale up the storage tech in Pornainen.

Once completed, the new battery will be integrated with the network of Loviisan Lämpö, the Finnish heating company that supplies district heating in the area.

“Loviisan Lämpö is moving towards more environmentally friendly energy production. With the Sand Battery, we can significantly reduce energy produced by combustion and completely eliminate the use of oil,” says CEO Mikko Paajanen.

The project also aligns with Pornainen’s plans for carbon neutrality. Many of its buildings, including the comprehensive school, town hall, and library, rely on district heating.

Mayor of Pornainen Antti Kuusela says the municipality “welcomes all innovative development projects that reduce emissions in district heating operations and contribute to network expansion.”

In total, the sand battery is expected to knock off 160 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions per year. As well as weaning the town off oil, woodchip burning is expected to drop by 60 per cent as a result.

The battery’s thermal energy storage capacity equates to almost one month’s heat demand in summer and a one-week demand in winter in Pornainen, Polar Night Energy says.

Construction and testing of the 13 metres high by 15 metres wide battery is estimated to take around 13 months, meaning it should be keeping residents warm well before winter 2025.

Is sand a sustainable material?

“We wanted to find something that can be sourced nearly everywhere in the world,” Markku said. But is sand as ubiquitous as we might think?

Demand for the construction material is set to soar by 45 per cent in the next 40 years, according to a recent Dutch study. Building sand is typically extracted from rivers and lakes, and ‘sand pirates’ are speeding up its loss from these ecosystems.

But as far as the Finnish engineers are concerned, it doesn’t really matter where the sand comes from. Though builders’ sand was used initially (to limit transport emissions), sand batteries work with any sand-like material that has a high enough density, within certain thermodynamic parameters.

In Pornainen, Polar Night Energy has found a sustainable material in crushed soapstone; a by-product of a Finnish company’s manufacture of heat-retaining fireplaces.

“Tulikivi is a well-known and traditional company,” says Naskali. “The soapstone they use is a very Finnish thing.”

“We always choose the thermal energy storage medium based on the customer’s needs. Examining and testing different materials is crucial for us to use materials that are suitable in terms of properties, cost-effectiveness, and promotion of circular economy,” she adds.

Polar Night Energy has big ambitions to take its technology worldwide.

As Markku told us back in 2022, “we want to build a hundred times larger storages around the world as fast as possible.”

Source euronews.green

Phosphazene-based electrolytes for high-voltage lithium batteries that work in extreme environments

Posted on September 28, 2023 by dishanth

Lithium metal batteries have numerous notable advantages over other existing battery systems, including high energy density. Nonetheless, the use of most existing high-energy lithium metal batteries in extreme environments is typically deemed unsafe or unfeasible, due to the volatility and flammability of their electrolytes.

Researchers at Bar-Ila University, University of Technology Sydney, CIC energiGUNE, and Tsinghua University recently set out to develop new electrolytes that could support the safe and stable operation of lithium metal batteries in a broader range of environmental conditions. These electrolytes, introduced in Nature Energy, were synthesized by using the fireproof phosphazene-derivative polymeric matrices.

“Replacing the graphitic anodes with metallic Li is considered a viable path to further increase the energy density of Lithium batteries,” Professor Doron Aurbach, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Tech Xplore.

“However, the growth of dendrites on Li anode during cycling triggers catastrophic safety hazards, which severely hinders their practical applications. To solve this issue, ether-based electrolytes have been widely employed in Li metal batteries because of their relatively low reactivity with Li metal.”

Ether-based electrolyte solutions have a low viscosity and high ionic conductivity. These favorable properties can facilitate the rapid conduction of Li-ions and the exchange of interfacial charges in lithium batteries.

Ether-based electrolytes are also highly compatible with Li metal anodes, thus they can suppress the growth of dendrites while batteries are charging. Despite these advantages, many ether solvents are highly flammable, thus their use can greatly reduce the safety of battery cells.

“The low boiling points of ethers pose safety risks including fire, explosion, and liquid leakage,” Doron said. “Besides, the insufficient oxidation stability of ether-based electrolytes may lead to uncontrollable solvent decomposition on the cathode surface at high voltage (>4 V vs. Li/Li+), greatly deteriorating the cyclability of high-voltage Li metal batteries.”

In recent years, some research teams also introduced localized high-concentration electrolytes, which limit free solvent molecules in Li+ solvation structures. While these alternative electrolytes can reduce the time it takes to extinguish any fires that might arise, they do not fully eliminate the risk of fires or leakages.

“Polyphosphazene flame retardants with excellent flame-retardant effects have been widely used in the field of polymer flame retardants,” Doron said. “Combined with localized high-concentration electrolytes, the hybrids of polyphosphazene can effectively improve the flame-retardant effect with low addition contents. And the safety of the full cells can be largely promoted.”

In their recent paper, Professor Guoxiu Wang and their colleagues introduced a new versatile strategy to optimize ether-based electrolytes, preventing them from catching fire or leaking while also improving their compatibility with electrodes. This strategy entails a co-solvent and gelation treatment using butenoxycyclotriphosphazene (BCPN) monomers.

“To solve the inherent disadvantages of flammability and poor oxidation stability for ether-based electrolyte, fluoromethyl 1,1,1,3,3,3-hexafluoroisopropyl ether (SFE) was introduced as a co-solvent (served as an anti-solvent) with an ether solvent to improve the oxidation resistance and cathodes’ stability,” Wang said. “Then, these binary electrolytes were gelled in situ by polymerization of BCPN monomers to achieve flame retardancy and interfacial compatibility.”

In initial tests, Wang and his collaborator Dr. Dong Zhou found that their proposed treatment using fluorinated co-solvent and fireproof polymetric matrices fully eliminated risks of fire and electrolyte leakage in lithium metal batteries. The team were also able to achieve electrolytes that are highly compatible with high-energy cathodes using a carefully designed Li+ solvation sheath, along with the BCPN-derived protective surface films formed on the cathodes.

“We manufactured high-energy-density Li||NCM811 batteries using our gel electrolyte and these batteries achieved high-capacity retention, superior low-temperature performance, good cyclability under high pressure and steady power supply under abusive conditions,” Dr. Dong Zhou said. “We successfully solved the safety problem for high-energy lithium metal batteries.”

The recent work by this team of researchers could have important implications for the development of next-generation lithium batteries. The electrolytes introduced in Nature Energy and their underpinning design strategy could soon open a new path for fabricating high energy, durable and safely rechargeable Li metal batteries that can operate in extreme environments.

“In our next studies, we intend to continue our research on improving battery safety and low temperature performance, which would help to expand the extreme environment application of high energy density batteries, for instance allowing their integration in aerospace vehicles, submarines and polar region devices,” Wang added.

Source Tech Xplore

California’s Compressed Air Batteries

Posted on June 1, 2023June 1, 2023 by dishanth

Engineers and scientists have been developing ways to store unused energy from renewable sources as the world moves from fossil fuels to renewable energy. We’ve seen different types of batteries making their mark, including lithium-ion batteries, pumped hydro, tanks full of molten salt or silicon and more. Now, California has found a way to move past lithium into an even more sustainable battery – compressed air batteries. Compressed air batteries do not require lithium which is expensive and environmentally damaging to dig up. They store energy like solar and wind and are a 24/7 source of clean power for homes and businesses.

In 2021, Hydrostor opened two new compressed air energy storage facilities in California, which provide almost twice the storage capacity. Their facilities use surplus electricity from the grid to run an air compressor. The compressed air is stored in a big underground tank until the energy is needed. When needed, the energy will be released through a turbine to generate electricity that is fed back into the grid. Reheating the air as it is fed into the turbine increases the system’s efficiency.

Hydrosor’s system is optimized for system sizes of over 100 megawatts with 5 hours up to multi-day storage duration. This is longer than the four-hour standard for lithium-ion. Hydrostor projects that it can produce 60% to 65% of the electricity it consumes, which is a larger energy loss than lithium-ion batteries or similar types of storage. Hydrostor says its systems will store up to 10 GWh of energy, providing between eight and 12 hours of energy over a full discharge at close to its maximum rate.

Earlier this year, California’s Central Coast Community Energy (3CE) approved a 25-year contract with Hydrostor to construct a compressed-air energy storage facility, making it the world’s largest compressed-air energy storage project. Two hundred megawatts of energy would help 3CE serve 447 000 customers between Santa Cruz and Santa Barbara with 100% clean and renewable energy by 2030. This project will help California transition off fossil fuels without causing blackouts.

Compared to lithium-ion batteries that degrade and must be replaced every few years, compressed air batteries can store energy for decades without any loss of efficiency. Compressed air batteries are significantly more expensive than lithium-ion, but the battery’s longevity will outweigh the cost.

Hydrosor has figured out a way to capture and reuse the heat generated when the air is compressed, which means no gas needs to be burned. The company also found a way to dig caverns out of rock rather than salt. These projects have been used elsewhere in places with underground salt domes, but they depend partly on natural gas to heat compressed air as it leaves caverns to make it more efficient. Digging caverns out of rock opens up the possibility of compressed air battery storage worldwide.

3CE’s partnership with Hydrosor will allow for California’s renewable energy to be clean and sustainable. These compressed-air batteries will protect the planet and the people of California and will be an example for other states to implement.

Source Happy Eco News

Made in America: A lithium supply chain for EV batteries

Posted on November 8, 2022 by dishanth

With the U.S. supplying 1 percent of the world’s lithium, there’s nowhere to go but up.

About 30 miles east of Reno, Nevada — past Tesla’s sprawling Gigafactory battery plant and the arid dusty grasslands of Northern Nevada — a startup is developing a large factory that could help unlock lithium, a key ingredient in electric vehicle batteries, from the earth.

The six-year-old company, Lilac Solutions, makes small white beads that can extract lithium from salty water deposits called brines, found around the world in places such as Argentina and Chile — and also Nevada and California. So-called ion-exchange beads are already used for various industrial applications such as cleaning water, but these are the first used for extracting lithium.

The U.S. is a bit player in the global lithium mining and processing game, dwarfed by other countries. The U.S. produces about 1 percent of the world’s lithium, while Australia, Chile, Argentina and China collectively produce over 90 percent. For decades, the only lithium that trickled out of the U.S. came from a small mine in Nevada run by chemical company Albemarle.

But as global sales of EVs have begun to rise dramatically — expected to grow from just under 10 percent of new passenger vehicle sales in 2021 to 23 percent by 2025 — lithium demand has gone through the roof. The global demand for lithium is expected to rise from 500,000 metric tons of lithium carbonate equivalent in 2021 to 3 to 4 million metric tons by 2030. The problem is clear: Relying on other countries for essentially all the critical minerals that make up EV batteries is not just a liability, it’s a missed opportunity.

That’s why a collective effort is underway to shift the tectonic plates under the world’s lithium supply chain to include the U.S. Mining giants, automakers, tech startups, lithium speculators, state and local governments and the Biden administration have all been trying to kickstart America’s domestic lithium initiatives. New lithium projects, from mining to processing, are proposed across states including California, Nevada, North Carolina, Tennessee and Maine.

American automakers including General Motors, Tesla and Ford will need hundreds of thousands of tons of lithium to meet growing demand for lithium-ion-powered electric vehicles.
Earlier this month, President Joe Biden unveiled a plan to dole out close to $3 billion in grants to 20 companies that are manufacturing, processing or mining key minerals, including lithium, for electric vehicle batteries. Lilac Solutions was chosen to negotiate a $50 million grant to help build its planned factory in Fernley, Nevada, near Reno.

The Biden administration’s Department of Energy funding follows the newly established law, the Inflation Reduction Act, which ties some tax credits for electric vehicles to battery minerals that are extracted, processed or recycled in the U.S. This spring the administration also used the Defense Production Act to increase the American production of battery minerals.

While China, Australia, Chile, Argentina and others are likely to dominate the lithium supply chain for the foreseeable future, domestic U.S. sources for mining, processing and recycling lithium will be important to help bolster the emerging American EV industry.

Mine the brine

Lilac, founded in 2016 and based in Oakland, California, has been quietly attracting interest from mining partners such as Australia’s Lake Resources as well as big-name investors. Last year, the company closed on a $150 million round of series B funding from Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Chris Sacca’s Lowercarbon Capital. Lilac’s investors also include T. Rowe Price, MIT’s The Engine and Tesla backer Valor Equity Partners.

The startup has drawn a who’s who of funders because of its potential ability to unlock lithium from the world’s brines. Much of the current global lithium supply is dug out of hard rock in mines like in Australia. But there are untapped resources in salty water deposits, where the lithium exists in low concentration and the mixture has high impurities. Lilac says its beads can suck out the lithium from the solution and leave the rest of the brine mixture intact to be returned back to the environment.

The massive brine lithium mines of South America — found in places such as Chile’s Atacama desert — use huge amounts of water and land and take 12 to 18 months to produce lithium through solar evaporation. A technology like Lilac’s could offer a more efficient, more sustainable method across a much smaller footprint.

Part of Lilac’s Series B funding is being spent on getting the Fernley factory into production, Lilac CEO Dave Snydacker told GreenBiz last month. The $50 million from the DOE will help accelerate production, and the agency said Lilac’s funding will create 150 new jobs.

Snydacker said the plant will come online in phases over the next two years and eventually will be able to make enough beads to support the extraction of 200,000 tons per year of lithium. That’s the equivalent of close to half of the amount of lithium produced globally last year. The funding doesn’t just add to Lilac’s war chest, it also adds validation and the spotlight of the White House.

At the event where Biden unveiled the EV battery minerals grants, 10 executives of companies, many of them startups, appeared behind Biden on a screen and four made remarks about how the funding would be used. Three of the four speakers were leaders of lithium production and processing companies: Albemarle; American Battery Technology Company; and ICL-IP America.

Albemarle plans to use a $150 million grant from the DOE to build a lithium concentrator plant at a mine in Kings Mountain, North Carolina. A concentrator increases the amount of lithium per volume and is one step in the process to get it ready to put into batteries. When it’s up and running, the Kings Mountain lithium supply chain would be able to produce and process enough lithium for 750,000 electric cars per year.

It makes sense for U.S. companies to try to tap into domestic lithium when it’s done sustainably and in a sensitive way for local communities.
Albemarle is also doubling the size of its lithium mine, Silver Peak, in Nevada, about 200 miles southeast from Fernley and Tesla’s Gigafactory. In Nevada alone, there are 17,000 prospecting claims for lithium, the Guardian recently reported.

Long road for U.S. lithium

Becoming a player in the global lithium supply chain won’t be easy for U.S. stakeholders. Companies looking to build new mines or reopen older ones face lengthy environmental review processes and are often challenged by local Indigenous communities. And rightly so, mining companies have long histories of polluting lands and neglecting the needs of groups that might use the lands as sacred sites, communal purposes or for hunting and fishing.

Most of the domestic critical mineral deposits needed for EV batteries — lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper — are near Native American reservations. Lithium Americas Corp. has faced resistance from both Native American tribes and environmentalists over its proposed lithium mine, Thacker Pass, in Nevada. By some estimates, Thacker Pass could contain the largest hard rock lithium deposit in the U.S.

American automakers including General Motors, Tesla and Ford will need hundreds of thousands of tons of lithium to meet growing demand for lithium-ion-powered electric vehicles. The industry won’t be able to source all of that domestically and fast enough, and South American lithium mines are likely to play a key role in the growing American EV boom.

But it makes sense for U.S. companies to try to tap into domestic lithium when it’s done sustainably and in a sensitive way for local communities. Investors are eager to put money into U.S. lithium initiatives — it can be cheaper to finance U.S. projects versus international ones — and there are shipping efficiencies if mining, processing and battery production projects can all be on the same continent.

With America supplying just 1 percent of the world’s lithium, there’s nowhere to go but up when it comes to American-made and -processed lithium. And for Lilac Solutions, if the technology works economically at a commercial scale as its supporters hope it does, its Nevada factory could be a key way for an American-made tech to be the one to help unlock the world’s lithium.

Source GreenBiz

As lithium reserves dwindle, Singapore EV battery recycling startup aims to plug supply gap

Posted on May 9, 2022 by dishanth

Cars are going electric but the rising piles of their used batteries will become a very big problem three to four years down the road. But the world can’t wait three to four years for a solution. “We need one now,” says Bryan Oh, chief executive of NEU Battery Materials, a Singapore-based startup that takes a unique approach to battery recycling.

Electric vehicles (EVs) put on the road in 2019 alone will eventually produce 500,000 tonnes of battery waste. By 2040, two-thirds of all car sales are expected to be electric generating 1,300 gigawatt-hours of waste batteries, according to the International Energy Agency. Currently, only about 5 per cent of Lithium-ion batteries, the rechargeable batteries most commonly found in EVs, are recycled globally.

Disposing of lithium, which is prized for its conductive properties, is particularly problematic. Typically, lithium isn’t recovered from the battery recycling process, because recycling it is complicated and involves multiple stages to purify it. A lack of a viable alternative means that it is currently cheaper to mine more lithium than recycle it. But this could change as global lithium supply comes under pressure.

Demand for lithium has quadrupled in the past 10 years. As a result, lithium prices have soared, quadrupling in a year. Elon Musk, the chief executive of electric automaker Tesla, said earlier this year that he would consider mining the element himself, to bring prices under control. Mining expert Joe Lowry said last week that lithium supply is falling worryingly short of demand, which is projected to be 14 times greater by 2030.

People drive a Tesla because they want to be green. But they don’t realise how much pollution is created from mining materials and manufacturing EVs.

Bryan Oh, founder and chief executive, NEU Battery Materials

Oh, who was among the winners of sustainability solutions contest The Liveability Challenge in 2021, believes his firm’s technology is a gamechanger in keeping lithium supply in circulation, using a method that has a low environmental impact.

Typically, recovering metals from batteries involves burning or using acid — both polluting processes. Oh’s method, which was developed by the National University of Singapore (NUS), uses electricity to extract the lithium from used batteries. This reduces the amount of chemicals and water needed in the process.

The technology is still in its pilot phase but Oh has ambitious plans to expand overseas and set up up in major EV markets, like China and Europe. He is about to close another round of seed funding as he eyes scale.

In this interview with Eco-Business, Oh talks about the impact of Covid and soaring lithium prices on his venture, the challenges of finding talent in an emerging industry, and what he wants to say to Elon Musk.

How does NEU’s battery recycling technology work?

NEU’s technology focuses on lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries. This is a type of lithium-ion battery increasingly used by Tesla and other major EV makers.

LFP batteries do not contain nickel or cobalt, so are usually considered of lower recycling value than other types of lithium-ion batteries. NEU’s technology can extract the lithium at lower cost.

An electrochemical process separates the batteries into iron phosphate and lithium hydroxide, at a recovery rate of more than 95 per cent and purity levels of about 99 per cent for both materials.

This process for producing battery grade lithium is up to 100 times less polluting and up to 10 times more profitable compared to existing recycling technologies, according to NEU.

What impact has the high price of lithium had on your venture?

By next year, some reports predict that there will not be enough lithium to support EV growth. The price increase is a clear sign that there is not enough supply. The price will continue to go up, and that could hurt EV adoption. Consumers are not going to pay double the price for an EV car. It’s urgent that we find alternative sources of raw materials to sustain industry growth.

What impact did Covid have on your venture?

We were born out of Covid. Before Covid I was working on a startup called PortaLockers, a portable storage system. Covid killed my startup, but it did give me the opportunity to work with the NUS Graduate Research Innovation Programme (NUS GRIP), out of which NEU Battery Materials was born.

There have been many downsides to Covid — I got the sense that businesses were less open to innovation, it was difficult in the beginning. But Covid did drive a change in the market perception of EVs. In 2019, nobody was really talking about electrification. But in 2020, we started to see regulations pushing for EVs as pressure grew on governments to fight climate change.

How far are you from being a fully functioning, commercially viable lithium recycler?

Our first milestone is to build the pilot site in Singapore, which should be up and running by the third quarter of this year. It may not be fully automated, but we will be able to collect all the data we need to scale the operation. We can achieve scale easier than other recyclers, because we use a cell stacks system that works like Lego. It allows us to adapt to changing market demand very quickly.

The EV market in Singapore is still young. Will you have enough used battery feedstock to sustain the business?

There isn’t the same level of feedstock in Singapore as there is in other markets, like China, Europe and the United States. So we will be looking to expand overseas over the next few of years. There is already a decent supply of lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries in Singapore from older EVs, hybrid vehicles, energy storage units, power tools and forklifts. We’re working with a battery crushing company in Singapore, Secure Waste Management, that provides us with feedstock.

Where will you look to expand?

Where the big global EV markets are. Lithium is a key commodity for EVs. All of the world’s big EV markets are setting up their own domestic supply chains for EVs. Shipping batteries is more dangerous than transporting your average household products, so there’s a need for local recycling infrastructure to keep EVs materials in circulation locally. It also reduces logistical costs and the carbon footprint of production. This is why Tesla is setting up a new giga factory [which makes lithium-ion batteries and electric vehicle components] in the US, in addition to its factories in Europe and China. In China, more than 60 per cent of batteries are LFP now — and nobody’s recycling it. It’s an untapped market.

Clearly there’s a huge market opportunity for your technology, and the timing seems to be right. But what are the key challenges you’re facing?

One is regulatory support. This is still a new industry, and some regulations still need to be worked out along the way. But I feel the Singapore government is supportive of EVs [the government recently set a new target to reduce the city-state’s land transport emissions by 80 per cent from its 2016 peak “by or around mid-century”, and plans for every public housing area to be EV-ready by 2025].

Another is finding the right talent and skillset in a new field in a country with a young EV market [Oh is currently looking to hire an electrochemical engineer], particularly as we look to scale. Our company is built on technology. As long as we can demonstrate the technology with a successful pilot, the business and the partners will come, because we offer a recycling solution that nobody else has. People form the core of our technical knowledge, and we’re always looking for more.

Also, getting noticed by car manufacturers is not easy, as we are still small. I know that Tesla will be interested in us, as they will need to find a recycling solution in Singapore. If I could have five minutes with Elon Musk, I just need to tell him that we are recycling LFP batteries. I’m hoping that with the pilot site, we’ll be able to attract these guys to come down to look at what we’re trying to do.

Pressure on supply of the materials needed to make electric cars has provided impetus to supporters of deep-sea mining. What are your thoughts on deep-sea mining?

Deep-sea mining could ruin ocean ecosystems so that we can electrify the transport industry. It is ironic that we would be destroying the environment to protect the environment. But I do understand the reasons for deep-sea mining. Governments are in a race to electrify transport. If they don’t electrify as fast as other countries, they lose competitive advantage.

Where do you see yourself in five years’ time?

I hope that we will have a global presence, with Singapore as the hub for innovation, with around 100 people. We’ll be recycling all LFP batteries and reducing a proportion of the waste from the EV industry. I want to create an industry that is clean and sustainable. People drive a Tesla because they want to be green. But a lot of people don’t realise how much pollution is created from mining materials and manufacturing EVs. We want to be able to offset some of this pollution.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

This story is part of a series on the finalists of The Liveability Challenge, an annual search for solutions to make Southeast Asia’s cities cleaner, greener places to live and work, backed by Temasek Foundation.

Source Eco Business

Mine e-waste, not the Earth, say scientists

Posted on May 9, 2022 by dishanth

The recycling of e-waste must urgently be ramped up because mining the Earth for precious metals to make new gadgets is unsustainable, scientists say.

One study estimated that the world’s mountain of discarded electronics, in 2021 alone, weighed 57 million tonnes.

The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) says there now needs to be a global effort to mine that waste, rather than mining the Earth.

Global conflicts also pose a threat to supply chains for precious metals.

The RSC is running a campaign to draw attention to the unsustainability of continuing to mine all the precious elements used in consumer technology.

Waste electronics to outweigh Great Wall of China
Millions of old gadgets ‘stockpiled in drawers’

It points out that geopolitical unrest, including the war in Ukraine, has caused huge spikes in the price of materials like nickel, a key element in electric vehicle batteries.

This volatility in the market for elements is causing “chaos in supply chains” that enable the production of electronics. Combined with the surge in demand, this caused the price of lithium – another important component in battery technology – to increase by almost 500% between 2021 and 2022.

Demand for lithium batteries is only expected to grow

Some key elements are simply running out.

“Our tech consumption habits remain highly unsustainable and have left us at risk of exhausting the raw elements we need,” said Prof Tom Welton, president of the Royal Society of Chemistry, adding that those habits were “continuing to exacerbate environmental damage”.

Elements in smartphones that could run out in the next century:

Gallium: Used in medical thermometers, LEDs, solar panels, telescopes and has possible anti-cancer properties
Arsenic: Used in fireworks, as a wood preserver
Silver: Used in mirrors, reactive lenses that darken in sunlight, antibacterial clothing and gloves for use with touch screens
Indium: Used in transistors, microchips, fire-sprinkler systems, as a coating for ball-bearings in Formula One cars and solar panels
Yttrium: Used in white LED lights, camera lenses and can be used to treat some cancers
Tantalum: Used in surgical implants, electrodes for neon lights, turbine blades, rocket nozzles and nose caps for supersonic aircraft, hearing aids and pacemakers

All the while, the amount of e-waste generated is growing by about two million tonnes every year. Less than 20% is collected and recycled.

“We need governments to overhaul recycling infrastructure and tech businesses to invest in more sustainable manufacturing,” said Prof Welton.

New research by the RSC also revealed a growing demand from consumers for more sustainable technology. In an online survey of 10,000 people across 10 countries, 60% said they would be more likely to switch to a rival of their preferred tech brand if they knew the product was made in a sustainable way.

The survey also suggested that people did not know how to deal with their own e-waste. Many respondents said they worried about the environmental effect of unused devices they have in their homes, but did not know what to do with them or were concerned about the security of recycling schemes.

Elizabeth Ratcliffe from the Royal Society of Chemistry, told BBC Radio 4’s inside Science that many of us were “unwittingly stockpiling precious metals in our homes”, in old phones and defunct computers.

Previous RSC research showed that millions of us are unwittingly stockpiling precious elements by keeping old devices in our homes

“Manufacturers and retailers need to take more responsibility,” said Ms Ratcliffe. “Like ‘take-back’ schemes, meaning people can return their electronics to a retailer and be assured they will be recycled securely.

“All this volatility in supply chains really just reinforces the fact that we need a circular economy for these materials. At the moment, we’re just mining them out of the ground constantly.”

The society hopes to encourage people to take old and unwanted devices to recycling centres, rather than stuff them into drawers and forget about them. It points UK consumers to online resources where they can find the nearest centre that pledges to recycle computers, phones and other devices securely.

“The thing we always say is reduce, reuse and recycle. So perhaps keep a phone for longer and maybe sell an old phone or give it to a relative,” says Ms Ratcliffe. “It will need everyone working together to scale up these processes and put the infrastructure in place, so we can all recycle our devices.”

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Source BBC