A team of researchers in China has found a way to bring dead lithium-ion batteries back to life, potentially reducing both the amount of waste that’s quickly piling up from spent electric vehicle (EV) batteries and the need to produce as many new ones.
“The team’s work is revolutionary because it provides a new idea to reuse end-of-life batteries,” says Jiangong Zhu of Tongji University in Shanghai, who researches battery use in EVs and was not involved in the new study, which was published recently in Nature.
The amount of spent lithium-ion batteries that need disposal is expected to soar from an estimate of 900,000 metric tons this year to 20.5 million metric tons by 2040, according to a report released by the United Nations Development Program last September. As the world’s leader in deploying EVs, China is already handling 2.8 million metric tons of retired cells ever year, according to Huang Jianzhong, chairman of China Electronic Energy Saving Technology Association, a government-approved trade body.
Read more in Scientific American here.
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