Source: Forbes
Author: Alan Ohnsman
Redwood Materials, a battery recycler created by Tesla cofounder JB Straubel, plans to collect used electric and hybrid vehicle packs from Ford and Volvo Cars in California, making rechargeable cars and trucks more sustainable by reusing valuable mined materials they use.
This kind of closed-loop recycling and reuse is necessary to ensure the sustainability and affordability of electric vehicles, according to Straubel. “By recycling these batteries we’ll recover the valuable, critical materials inside and keep those materials directly in the supply chain loop,” he said in a video presentation. “This immediately reduces the need for more mining of these same components.”
The electric vehicle battery market is one of the key drivers of the push to mine the deep sea. For a truly sustainable transition to a low-carbon economy, we need to be amplifying initiatives to reuse and recycle, rather than perpeturating a damaging extractive model.
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