How Analysis Helps Guide Battery Recycling R&D at the ReCell Center
The ReCell Center was established by the US Department of Energy’s Vehicle Technologies Office to develop a practical process for the recycling of lithium-ion batteries. But if a recycling process is going to be adopted by industry, it must be economical. And since a main motivation for electric vehicles is environmental, the process must be “green” as well. Therefore, early in their development, ReCell processes are subjected to careful technical and economic analysis, using our publicly available and award-winning EverBatt model, to verify that they will be economical and environmentally friendly. This presentation will describe processes under development and illustrate the use of technical and economic analysis to evaluate them and compare them to alternatives.
Linda Gaines is Chief Scientist of the new ReCell Center for Advanced Battery Recycling and a Transportation Systems Analyst at Argonne National Laboratory. She holds a BA in Chemistry and Physics from Harvard, and a Ph.D. in Physics from Columbia. Her primary interest is problem solving, applied to efficient use of resources. She began her career by writing handbooks of energy and material flows in major industries that enabled later studies of technical and institutional issues involved in recycling discarded tires, packaging, automobiles, and most recently, batteries. She is an editor of the journal Sustainable Materials and Technologies.