South Korean governments are partnering with automaker Hyundai Motor to set up a system for recycling retired electric vehicle (EV) batteries on the southern resort island of Jeju, reflecting expectations of a surge in use of such cars.
Hyundai signed a preliminary agreement with local, provincial and national government entities to establish a battery recycling system, South Korea's ministry of trade, industry and energy (Motie) said. The venture will extract valuable metals from spent EV batteries, including cobalt, nickel and manganese, so the materials can be sold for reuse.
Jeju has the highest concentration of EVs in South Korea, owing to generous local subsidies, and the provincial government this week opened a recycling centre on the island to do research and testing on battery reuse. Recycling facilities will be added to the centre to retrieve and process as many as 1,500 spent batteries each month.
The South Korean EV industry has just seven years of sales under its belt, and there are around 60,000 EVs on the country's roads. Because of the newness of the fleet and relatively low sales volumes in earlier years, only 112 batteries have been retired and turned in to municipalities, Motie said. But with EV sales volumes accelerating rapidly, the number of spent batteries will rise to 1,464 next year and to 9,155 in 2022, according to estimates by local development agency Jeju Technopark.
Recycling volumes are expected to grow faster after 2022, by which time South Korea's government aims for the country to have 430,000 EVs in service. Government and industry partners in the recycling venture will need to work jointly to set the best methods for extracting and reusing valuable metals from retired batteries, Seoul's environment ministry said.
Governments and carmakers around the world are racing to find ways to reuse retired EV batteries and keep them out of landfills. Many power packs will still have years of useful life remaining in them after being taken off the roads, so EV makers are studying ways to boost their revenue by repackaging the batteries for energy storage or charging systems. The other option, as South Korea is now pursuing, is to focus more on recovering valuable metals.
