More and more electric vehicles are being driven on German roads, making the question of what happens to old batteries increasingly important. A battery recycling plant has now started operations in Hamburg.
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00:00 In the event of an emergency, an electric vehicle battery has to be dropped into water as quickly as possible.
00:07 When recycling these, the safety requirements are enormous.
00:11 A warehouse like this one has to be flooded with foam within minutes.
00:15 EV batteries are extremely flammable or explosive.
00:19 Since we opened, we've been on an interesting journey.
00:24 It was pretty exciting even at the beginning.
00:28 The first company to do recycling could make a huge fortune.
00:31 That's because batteries contain valuable metals like cobalt and nickel.
00:35 We expect 15 million electric vehicles on German roads by 2030.
00:40 15 million is practically the day after tomorrow, economically speaking.
00:45 We're visiting Europe's largest recycling plant for electric vehicle batteries, which opened just a few months ago.
00:54 We're standing here on one of the most expensive floors in Germany.
00:58 Implementing safety first doesn't necessarily mean saving money.
01:02 The floor is absolutely watertight, several meters thick,
01:06 and equipped with a sensor that would notify us immediately if any substances were to seep into the ground.
01:12 The batteries delivered have issues and have been pulled out in the car factories.
01:18 However, only a few are still coming here.
01:23 Our focus is primarily on testing and implementing new technologies and then using them.
01:28 We're focused on learning as much as we can to be ready for when the old batteries come out,
01:33 when the high volume suddenly arrives.
01:36 That high volume will arrive when the batteries of the first generation of electric vehicles fail in a few years.
01:44 Then big business will beckon with the so-called black mass and the metals it contains.
01:53 Our goal is to recover 95% of our nickel, which is the most expensive, most valuable ore, including aluminum and copper, of course.
02:04 The world is turning to electric vehicles, and the demand for these metals for batteries will grow significantly.
02:13 By recycling them, manufacturers could reduce the need to source them from mines with poor working conditions.
02:21 We are too dependent on raw materials from third countries.
02:25 The material from the German recycling plant ends up in a pilot plant in northern Europe.
02:31 The battery is shredded and using a chemical process turned into what's known as black mass, the black gold of the recycling industry.
02:40 Among other things, you can extract this green mix of nickel, manganese and cobalt from it,
02:46 which is used in this form for new batteries. But is the price right?
02:51 It's difficult to give exact prices at the moment because the business is still in development.
02:57 What's more, world market prices fluctuate greatly. That makes it difficult to calculate.
03:03 When operations get ramped up, much of the process will be automated.
03:10 However, the batteries still need to be improved for high recycling rates.
03:15 With car batteries, we can clearly see that the German car manufacturers are now focusing more and more on optimizing product design for recycling.
03:23 They want to work with us because they are just as interested in raw materials as we are.
03:28 They also want to close the cycle.
03:30 And high recycling rates such as for aluminum have another advantage. In the end, they're also good for the climate.
03:42 Every ton of aluminum that we can return to the smelters, for example, saves 95% in energy and therefore CO2.
03:49 These are the real heroes, quasi-raw materials compared to raw materials that we get from the mines.
03:55 The operators of the recycling plant have invested millions in what they believe will be a safe bet.
04:04 www.pangol.de/recycling