Renault has announced that it’s working to achieve full recovery and purification of the metals used in electric vehicle (EV) batteries, ready to be reused in new ones.
In collaboration with waste management experts Veolia and chemicals company Solvay, the French car brand is looking to pioneer a closed loop recycling system for EV battery metals.
Groupe Renault’s CEO, Luca de Meo, commented, “Groupe Renault has a holistic approach to the battery life cycle: repairing first-life batteries to extend their automotive lifespan, developing second-life applications for energy storage and setting up a system for collecting and recycling batteries. Today, we are proud to reinforce our commitment to battery recycling by joining forces with Veolia and Solvay.”
While electric vehicles are being hailed as the way forward, there are real concerns about how sustainable they are due to the combination of metals their batteries contain. The mining and processing of cobalt, nickel, lithium and other rare earth metals is associated with several social and environmental issues. So the ability to reclaim them from end-of-life batteries and purify them sufficiently to be reused in new ones could make a huge positive difference.
Way to go Renault!
