Battery recycling conference highlights the rise of lithium-ion batteries

The battery recycling sector needs to adjust to increasing volumes of lithium-ion batteries on the market, as the number of lithium-ion batteries in use continues to grow, particularly in the fields of electronics and electric mobility.

This fact became evident last week in Montreux, Switzerland, where 200 delegates from the international battery recycling industry gathered at the International Congress for Battery Recycling ICBR 2015. The event is organised by the Swiss company ICM AG, which specialises in recycling industry events.

The two-day congress included presentations from more than 20 industry experts and was complemented on the third day with a workshop on the safe transportation of lithium batteries and a tour of Batrec Industrie AG in Wimmis, Switzerland.

Lithium-ion batteries were the focus of many presentations. The high-performance batteries provide energy for a host of mobile electronic devices such as smartphones and digital cameras. Last year, around 1.8 billion mobile telephones, 230 million tablets and 170 million notebooks were sold worldwide and the upward trend appears to be continuing.

According to Christophe Pillot, CEO of the French market research institute Avicenne Energy, between 2010 and 2025, the demand for mobile telephones is forecast to rise by an average of 6 percent per year. Consequently, demand for lithium-ion batteries is also multiplying. Whereas in the year 2000, this type of battery provided 2 gigawatt hours (GWh) of energy, the figure rose to 46 GWh by 2014, Pillot explaied. Nevertheless, lead-acid batteries still account for the majority of market share, comprising 90 percent last year.

In the future, lithium-ion batteries are likely to be used in even more fields of application. The experts in Montreux were confident that this type would become increasingly popular in the fields of electric mobility and industrial applications.

Hartmut Stahl from the Institute of Applied Ecology predicted that by the year 2050, some 43.4 million vehicles on roads worldwide will be powered by lithium-ion batteries.

For the recycling industry, this means getting adjusted to a new mixture of materials going into the future. Therefore, several of the lectures held at the ICBR dealt with possible ways of optimising existing recycling processes. In addition, new trends in the recycling of lithium-ion batteries and alkaline batteries were presented.

Last but not least, the collection of obsolete batteries was another topic of discussion at the event. Take-back systems such as GRS in Germany, BatteryPack in the UK, Inobat in Switzerland and JBRC in Japan presented their systems and strategies at the ICBR.

Inobat, for example, boasts a collection rate of 71.4 percent, and that figure is expected to increase, as the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment is targeting an 80 percent collection rate.

How much of this volume actually ends up being recycled is a financial question, explained Batrec CEO Dieter Offenthaler at the conference. Technically speaking, a great deal is possible, but recycling processes need to be profitable as well, Offenthaler said.