Is lithium batteries really that environmentally friendly?

With the continuous development of new energy vehicles, lithium batteries are constantly being pushed to the forefront. Whether lithium batteries are environmentally friendly or not, how to recycle and utilize them has become the focus of public opinion. Today, as a professional manufacturer of lithium electric equipment connectors, Aimaisi, is also concerned about the Environmental Protection of lithium batteries. There are deep doubts about the problem. The following small compilation discusses whether lithium batteries are environmentally friendly from the following aspects:

1, on the lithium battery positive and negative electrode material collection

Now the positive electrode materials of lithium batteries are mainly lithium cobalt acid, lithium manganese acid, lithium iron phosphate, and negative electrode materials are basically graphite, lithium titanate, and other materials. With the development of new energy vehicles, lithium batteries can be described as "big red". The global demand for lithium cobalt minerals has also shown exponential growth. As the world competes to replace fossil fuels with clean energy, the environmental impact of extracting batteries such as lithium and cobalt has become a serious problem.

In May 2016, hundreds of protesters threw dead fish from inland waters onto local streets. The leakage of toxic chemicals from local lithium mines has caused serious damage to the ecosystem.

From the pictures, there is a lot of dead fish floating on the river. According to some witnesses, livestock was also seen dying from drinking contaminated water and bodies floating downstream. With the dramatic increase in local mining activities, the environment is deteriorating.

Figure: Ataqiamagaoyuan of Bolivia. Workers drill holes in the surface of the world's largest saline-alkali land. Their goal is to find high levels of lithium in salt water rich in magnesium and potassium. Since the 21st century, most of the world's lithium has been extracted in this way, rather than using mineral resources.

Almasi believes that whatever kind of energy fuel, once involved in mining, there is no doubt that it will cause pollution to the environment. In recent years, as environmental protection problems have become more and more routine, it has to be forced to think about other methods for materials. Artificial manufacturing of positive and negative electrode materials gradually began to be on lithium batteries, rather than blindly collecting the required elements from ore, greatly reducing environmental pollution. The editor believes that with the rapid development of new energy vehicles, these problems will be solved one by one.

Lithium batteries have an advantage over conventional energy sources

From the perspective of the development of new energy vehicles, lithium batteries are more environmentally friendly, and the development of automotive fuel is accompanied by energy development. In the oil age, the use of gasoline and diesel fuel as power fuels in automobiles not only caused air pollution in cities but also increased fuel prices as a result of the shortage of oil supplies, followed by gas and bio-fuel vehicles as alternative fuels. Energy development has gradually transitioned to renewable energy. Electric vehicles that use solar energy, wind energy, and other power generation have emerged. Eventually, new energy vehicles with power cells as the main energy storage have emerged.

In the new energy vehicles, we see so far, pure electric vehicles occupy a large share, it can completely achieve zero emissions and pollution-free. Even if the energy he uses when he charges is converted into pollution emissions from power plants, the environmental pollution will be much smaller than that of fuel cars. Because power stations are more energy-efficient, we have less than 40 % of the internal combustion engine's thermal efficiency. The centralized discharge of power stations is also very easy to treat and install environmental protection equipment.

3, lithium battery environmental recycling is the focus

Now that the domestic recycling battery industry has just started, the corresponding recovery rate is only 2 %, which is really difficult to meet environmental protection standards. So what are the difficulties in the industry today with battery recycling?

First: the Dismantling process of used automobile power battery is complex and has hidden danger;

Second, product consistency is poor and the remaining life and battery status cannot be systematically evaluated; Many problems, such as immature system integration technology and poor recycling economy, need to be solved from top to bottom. And it has to be clear. Moreover, the small editor believes that it is also very necessary to give certain preferential policies to the responsible enterprises.

At present, according to the degree of scrapping, power battery recovery can be divided into echelon and recycling. Echelon utilization is a mild scrap and can be used for secondary use by energy storage equipment and low-speed electric vehicles. Recycling is a serious waste, and lithium, cobalt and other precious metal electrode materials are extracted by chemical methods to achieve the purpose of material remanufacturing.

From the analysis of the physical and chemical properties of the battery itself and the price of rare elements, it is generally believed in the industry that lithium iron phosphate batteries are more suitable for terraced use, and lithium trioxide batteries are suitable for direct recovery.

However, in the early stages of development, power cell recycling, whether for terracing or recycling, is characterized by immature business models, lack of sufficiently effective collection channels for used batteries and mismatches in battery disintegration/disassembly, and difficulty in predicting the remaining life.

Therefore, the recycling and reuse of lithium batteries is undoubtedly the most important issue in environmental protection. Whether it is a material collection or relative to traditional fuels, the development of lithium batteries and the advantages of environmental protection are gradually emerging. Lithium batteries will become the mainstream trend of power storage.

Almasi always adheres to the principle of environmental protection first, only adopts raw materials that conform to environmental protection ROHS certification, and provides customers with lithium battery connectors that conform to environmental protection certification, so that you will have no worries.

The page contains the contents of the machine translation.