Abstract
"Energy & The Circular Economy: Recycling Waste, Batteries"
As the 2021 World's Most Sustainable company and one of the world's largest non-automotive Lithium-Ion battery providers, there are high expectations for Schneider Electric to promote circularity. This presentation is a summary of experience from an OEM's perspective:
- Like a wave, our end-users drive expectations through the OEM and back to the mineral processor partners who recycle batteries. End-users expect adequate recovery, reuse and recycling when their use of the battery ends. For Lithium-Ion batteries, this can be a decade or more from when they enter the market from any place on the globe.
- While the availability of recycling options in today's market is limited, it is expanding as technology and capacity advance.
- An early focus was placed on developing a robust and safe Takeback Process and Qualified Secondary Uses that delay end-of-life while waiting for the recycling ecosystem to develop.
- Today, large-scale, Technically Feasible and global Recycling processes are coming into existence.
- And OEMs are advancing second-life applications in many ways
- In the development of Standards (e.g. UL 1974: Evaluation of Repurposing Batteries)
- Qualifying emerging second-use applications. This involves identifying suitable applications into which battery products are safely and effectively repurposed.
- The development infrastructure to support the logistics, evaluation, and repurposing of lithium-ion battery products.
- However, circularity still faces obstacles. Lithium-ion batteries generated as wastes are typically subject to stringent Dangerous Goods/HAZMAT requirements that make transporting them difficult.
Neither the end user, the OEM, Battery Manufacturer, nor the Mineral Recycler can undertake this alone. A circular battery platform requires all stakeholders to align.