Fixing the EV Industry’s Dirty Battery Problem

There’s one major hurdle on the road to mass electric vehicle adoption: batteries. Their long and dirty supply chains mean an American would have to drive their EV 13,500 miles before it was carbon neutral. In this segment from Getting Warmer, Kal Penn heads to Nevada to visit a Tesla co-founder (not him) who may be about to solve this problem.
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Getting Warmer is Bloomberg's exclusive new show about climate, clean energy and business, anchored by actor and former White House aide Kal Penn.
Accompany him on his journey as he takes an up-close look at bold climate solutions and discovers new facets of the global transition to clean energy.
In a hosted studio segment, Penn sifts through the overwhelming news about our climate and breaks down the facts and trends to understand with a dose of humor and optimism. Why are the recycling symbols on your plastic cups misleading? How does the carbon credit market work and does it actually help? And what is the future of water in a drought-ridden world?
On the road, Penn meets the innovators, researchers, communities and businesses pivoting to new energy sources and spearheading low-carbon technologies. In documentary segments, Penn speaks to the self-declared “crypto cowboys” of Texas who claim Bitcoin mining can help stabilize the state’s troubled electrical grid, and travels to Nevada to visit the company attempting to build America’s first closed-loop supply chain for electric vehicles. In New York, Penn explores the urban designs proposed to save the city from the next Superstorm Sandy and goes inside New York’s Empire State building to investigate the challenges of decarbonizing our cities and landmarks.
The show builds on, and includes contributions from, Bloomberg Green’s award-winning team of climate journalists as well as London-based climate storytellers Jack Harries and Alice Aedy. With a focus on the most pressing questions for young viewers, Jack and Alice unpack one big idea each episode. From recycled wastewater to regenerative agriculture and the challenges of a just transition for workers in the energy sector, they’ll break down how countries across the world are finding intriguing solutions to our climate crisis, and outline the challenges ahead.
Watch Getting Warmer starting February 1st at 8p EST streaming on Bloomberg channels on Connected TV Devices including Samsung TV+, LG Channels, and Fire TV. And on & Bloomberg.com.
You can also watch on Bloomberg TV (BTV) at 10p ET.
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[@rsaunders57]

Closed loop has been the process for the lead-acid batteries used in internal combustion cars, for decades. It was motivated to keep lead out of landfills, but it's also saved that battery industry a ton of money.

[@trumplostlol3007]

They will recycle probably 20% of the EV toxic compounds. Then ship "secretly" the rest to India or some other third world country. It is much cheaper to just ship everything else so that they don't need to deal with it.

[@beanapprentice1687]

@@trumplostlol3007 then we must create laws that force lithium ion batteries to be recycled locally. Just like we did with lead acid.

[@markcayer4859]

The video mentioned "chemicals" to melt down the batteries. My question is "What is the residue left over from the recycling process and where does that end up??"

[@aminulmehedi]

Looks like a PR campaign for Redwood. Btw Copper is not used as Anode, it’s a current conductor/connector in the battery. Graphite or Graphite/Silicon mix is used as Anode.

[@mech-E]

No, every Tesla does not have a Panasonic battery in it. It is a lot of them but not all.

[@propergander8509]

I see “right to repair” legislation possibly playing a big part in battery recycling! The biggest cobalt-hogs are actually mobile devices and accessories. Product design with disassembly in mind, heavily standardized battery form factors would make it easier for recycling companies to extract precious resources back from products! Heavily glued components, proprietary screws and batteries don’t just make repair and disassembly unnecessarily difficult for consumers, but also for recyclers! And it might not be a bad idea to require manufacturers of high-volume goods to publish detailed disassembly industructions or manuals that a disassembly robot can understand and utilize, lest more precious resources end up in landfills… I mean… they run on the same Gcode as a 3D-printer!

[@fullup91]

Exactly. We're all on this planet together. It makes sense for things to be designed with recycling in mind.

[@Schnitz13]

Germany has made recycling of precious and other metals paramount in the production of all kinds of consumer goods, including cars, for more than 20 years. The fact that this has yet to become standardized anywhere else is disgusting as we are only manufacturing a major headache for ourselves by making these metals harder to recycle instead of easier. If we cannot easily recycle lithium, cobalt, nickel, aluminium and the like, we're helping to accelerate the environmental catastrophe already in the making worldwide just to make EVs the next big thing. It's artificial the whole idea of generating demand and supply by forcing ICEs off the market AND not encouraging the first two Rs of the green energy triumvirate: REDUCE and RE-USE, not just RECYCLE.

[@ALCRAN2010]

This guy created a high end metals recycling yard.

[@trumplostlol3007]

Have you actually see what happen inside those so-called battery recycling plants? This is just FAKE PR. The metal compounds in a used battery are all messed up. They are NOT metals, but toxic and carcinogenic compounds that require expensive human labor to sort through. You can't just recycle the battery as a single unit (like a lead acid battery). There are electronic components too, just like your laptop computer. And a lot of these compounds are too expensive to recycle. Even if you do want to recycle them, you have to waste a lot of energy to recycle them back to the metal forms. All these disinformation is nothing more than FAKE PR. At the end of the day, 90% of these toxic and carcinogenic batteries will be shipped overseas for dumping. Do you know what happens to your used laptop computer? They are never recycled, but end up in the landfills somewhere on our planet.

[@RobbieForReal]

Claiming Musk was a founder of Tesla is a bit of misconception. He bought the company and sued to label himself a founder.

[@chrs3045]

Wow. I expected an environmentally friendly way to "fix" their "problem", meaning not just improving the supply chain but reducing the toxic waste

[@OIOIOIIOOIOOOOOIOIOOOIII]

be the change you want to see. why do you expect a reduction in toxic waste when you yourself has no skin in the game?

[@dansanger5340]

Recycling reduces waste and reduces transportation costs.

[@vsiegel]

That is very outdated - Panasonic is not the only battery source for Tesla, that is long ago.

[@highpath4776]

13.5k miles is about an average year miles in some place

[@highpath4776]

For Battery recovery it does seem better in the US rather than crude extractions done in india or africa, though labour rates will be more

[@1964mcqueen]

This idea is being repeated in many places. There is a recycling facility being built just blocks from my home in Canada which will supply materials to the new battery manufacturing facility down the highway which will supply batteries to the EV manufacturers in Ontario and Michigan. If only there was this kind of effort to clean up every extraction, processing and manufacturing process.

[@fauzirahman3285]

It's not impossible, but it sounds more like they'll have to be willing to put some money into that effort.

[@olly7248]

If only they would just stop destroying the environment for an unnecessary product… magical thinking 👎🏻🤬

[@X3MAntics]

Crazy what Kumar been up to nowadays.

[@Searchforfulltruth911]

,🤣😱💀☠️

[@stuartburns8657]

Wonder what happens to the toxic soup they use to separate the materials?

[@lawrencefrost9063]

They re-use it, or recycle it. They don't dump it, thank goodness. Well if you live in China...sure

[@JJs_playground]

Yup, I was thinking the same thing when they mentioned that part.

[@boomsuga]

Yeah that redwood guy and Elon weren’t founder of Tesla

[@nuvamusic]

I still prefer the idea of discovering and exploiting new battery technologies that are way more efficient than the current lithium/cobalt ones. Besides, recycling these metals can become very costly and energy consuming, which means being not environmentally friendly in the end.

[@_crispins]

10:00 “various chemicals” 🤨

[@Poxenium]

the EV industry doesn't have a "dirty battery problem". All EV batteries get reused, then recycled. The real problem is the small batteries from phones and laptops and other gadgets, which are almost never recycled.

[@WinPeters]

the problem is mined lithium... would take a comedian to distract you from that.

[@Poxenium]

@@WinPeters nope. Lithium is environmentally friendly, when compared to fossil fuel extraction and refining.

[@dedybadharu2804]

is it cheaper production cost? is the quality of the product comparable with the conventional produced one?

[@christopherpearson8637]

Yes and why are you asking? The polar bears are melting.

[@AlenMajetic]

Something that hasn't been brought up is that it's much cheaper if you have old battery to reuse. Because all the material is already fully enriched and waiting. Comments here seem to be of very clueless people. Instead of digging around and cleaning up rocks in hopes of finding materials, it's way easier and cheaper to reuse old materials. This has been documented before but I see hardly anyone studies and loves to spread misinformation without checking any facts at all.

[@OIOIOIIOOIOOOOOIOIOOOIII]

do you have any sources for your statements?

[@danielstapler4315]

A battery pack lasts say 10 years that means that the recycled battery materials can only be a small fraction of today's demand. And that will remain until demand for EVs stops increasing and we have a ten year wait.

[@Fieldsherbert]

Don't forget Envx.

[@mareksbesprozvannijs3463]

Nice

[@Omega---13]

JV Straubel is a co-founder of Tesla not an employee

[@shubhamagrawal2707]

Dr house would be happy

[@liontube8082]

Why is Kumar interviewing the Redwood guy?

[@bekind9668]

Love the orange shirt👍

[@stephenpahl7538]

2 things, I would hope to meet and talk to you some day and do more pieces, theres a 1000 stories from batteries to solar panels saving water and some agriculture/farming

[@sn5301679]

Fire hazard, the energy storages usually grow horizontally. Unless we find a better way to stack them together.

[@iDeondrae]

Don’t ignore the issues in Congo re Cobalt! Yes you show people around your luxurious factory and with all that money in the west but yet you can’t help the people at the start of the supply chain by improving their working conditions…

[@crackheadvibez5318]

Thank you!!!

[@fdsman]

go grab harold and get some white castle

[@poepybrown2151]

66 Batteries a second? There goes your 15 milliseconds of fame.

[@fltfathin]

@Gazr Gazr the rate is probably tied to grid frequency because induction motor speed synchronize with that

[@Schnitz13]

3:33: "And the world will only demand more (lithium-ion batteries) as time goes by." That's a generous statement given all the recent news in early 2024 of virtually EVERY major vehicle manufacturer now scaling back production of EVs as demand for them plummets. The hype and propaganda pushing EVs is being ignored by the masses, if not by the media, including Bloomberg as here.

[@kayakMike1000]

We're talking about lithium being scarce and we can't get enough of it, so how is it sustainable?

[@highpath4776]

its not that scarce , but it is in high concentrations in some places and less so in others so lots of waste materials, at one time lithium was a waste from other mining activities.

[@inquaanate2393]

It is sustainable because extraction and use does not destroy the global environment, only the local environment.

[@dansanger5340]

There is enough lithium in the Salton Sea area of California to meet all of projected US demand or 40% of projected world demand. And, it's able to be extracted using much greener methods than other lithium sources in the world.

[@tattoohick]

You can get all the copper you need in Michigan... Why do overseas smh

[@tophat2002]

A recycled battery is high grade ore

[@thegamechanger3793]

He biggest change is to let people work from home so they don’t need to buy extra car; less traffic and saving so much time; cars are getting more expensive year by year.

[@justlisten82]

Not every Tesla has a Panasonic battery... cmon now at least do some basic research.

[@wildbuddha]

Whitecastle!

[@jpcolindesign517]

I can guarantee that this facility will not come anywhere near achieving the numbers projected. First of all, it will NOT likely go into full production by 2025. There are several technical reasons (related to water availability and the complex processes planned for recycling the used batteries) for that which are NOT discussed in this video and which I don't have the time to illuminate here. There is also the issue of getting enough used batteries to them to keep them operating at full production. The amount of greenhouses gases produced by collecting and transporting the used batteries isn't discussed here either. There are HUGE holes in the plan presented here that are NOT discussed in the video. If this facility even reaches half of the output claimed, it would be a miracle. BEVs will not be the best option for most people on Earth in the long term. There are better options, but they involve significant lifestyle changes for the masses and are NOT compatible with ongoing obsolescence of technology and will NOT produce ongoing massive profits for individual automotive producers. If this facility is even completed, it will likely be a fluke of chance. This is largely based on junk science because lead-acid battery production is vastly different than current batteries and recycling them is a hugely different process. Beyond that, the supply chain for rare earth metals required to make batteries for EVs is about to run up on even more constraining chokepoints than they have in the past. This is largely a video about a well-constructed fantasy. Nothing mentioned in this video matches the reality on the ground, nor the evolving landscape for the EV industry.

[@dedybadharu2804]

but in theory it is possible isnt it? is it cheaper on production cost? is the quality of the product comparable with the conventional produced one?

[@israelpa123456789]

Hey doctor kevin

[@youxkio]

As soon as I saw the title of this video I immediately thought of @RedwoodMaterials. It makes sense all the way.

[@Donkey_Balls]

👏👏

[@MrSushmon]

Elon Musk and J B Straubel weren't founders of Tesla.

[@acquisitium]

this is a repost!

[@EvanToutz]

I wonder what kind of emissions the plant will emit.

[@polsigerson1037]

musk didn't found tesla

[@quentinmangel2265]

Driving a vehicle is NEVER carbon neutral, stop lying to you viewers ! Even a muscle powered bike is not carbon neutral... it's just less carbon intensive, less worse, but nothing is neutral or green, everything has an impact

[@avery4528]

Can’t focus without first asking what’s Kumar doing

[@u5s9e2hb4ijk7bv]

6:35

[@cathyk9197]

5.5% Battery Electric Vehicles global market share in 2022...not 4%🤣

[@Y2Kvids]

oh the presenter sounds funny

[@ericcheung4502]

EXRO technology

[@gronkotter]

Context needed: "Supply chains for petrol cars are convoluted, polluting, expensive, and with human rights issues. The average car needs 50 tons of oil over it's life, often imported from far away places like Russia and Saudi Arabia. This oil needs to be refined which has efficiency losses. In the car the fuel is burned which creates a bunch of different pollutants. Unfortunately it is impossible to recycle oil after it is burned."

[@KamleshMallick]

Why have not seen documentaries on dirty oil gasoline supply chain? But we see hundreds of features on EV supply chains. Definitely a paid agenda against EVs.

[@ResortDog]

Actually America was not net importing oil while we were drilling at home.

[@hoptoads]

LOL. If you are talking about the "Toxic CO2" being emitted by the burning of oil and coal and gas, as impossible to recycle, then apparently you haven't heard about trees and other plants.

[@KamleshMallick]

@@hoptoads Sure dude. Oil is gushing out from trees. 🤦🏽‍♂️

[@hoptoads]

@@KamleshMallick " and other plants" - have you ever heard of algae ? LOL, Climate hysterics are an endless source of comedy. How and where exactly do you think oil and coal and natural gas was created in the first place ? That's a rhetorical question of course, I wouldn't want you to burst a brain cell thinking too hard about the carbon 'life' cycle.

[@njipods]

badly researched. Tesla use batterys from a number of manufacturers. panasonic is just one

[@olly7248]

05:40 Untruths here, an EV is far from ‘carbon neutral’ after 13,428 miles… and the ‘28’ how is that part of the figure derived❓That’s called smoke and mirrors, urgh 🤬👎🏻😠🤬👎🏻

[@alxforbidden]

Model 3 is 🚾.

[@cyberry813]

😂😂😂

[@venkatraoirla9627]

THE COST OF REUSED MATERIALS SHOULD BE LESS THEN CONVENTIONAL ONE THEN ONLY PEOPLE WILL ACCEPT

[@highpath4776]

it wont be as the cost of extraction by cheap labour IS cheap.

[@TheRustyLM]

🦄🌈🧚‍♂️

[@proven22x52]

Oh you glossed over it, what chemicals do they use to seperate materials? CYANIDE

[@mattstirling7494]

Kal Penn is an international treasure.

[@Ratalala]

That transition mentioned will never come😈

[@Bryan-zo6ng]

Elon musk is not a cofounder

[@fauzirahman3285]

13,500 miles (21,726 KM) to make it carbon neutral after taking into account mining, production and shipping. I don't think I can make that distance until at least 13 years owning it. Think I won't be owning any other car for a while once my 10+ year old small petrol car dies.

[@idomaghic]

If you drive that little, (i.e. less than 2000km/year or less than 166km/month) then yes, it doesn't sound like you really need a car at all (at least not own). In the US, the average distance driven per year and driver happens to be 13500 miles, in EU the average is 11300km (i.e. roughly half), with other words, the average driver in the US would turn carbon neutral after a year, while in EU the average driver would need two years, both are extremely short periods of time considering the lifespan of the car.

[@joeking433]

Driving is so dangerous.

[@tdombui]

From White Castle burgers to Bloomberg documentaries, Kumar never fails to help the audience find the Truth.

[@victor-vq5eu]

I think liquid hydrogen will be better and way more efficient then electrification. Let’s see. I hope for the best for the nature and us.

[@knoworiginality]

Conversion efficiency is much lower. It just doesn't make sense for anything smaller/lighter than an airliner.

[@JJs_playground]

Hydrogen makes a lot of sense for boats and planes, but I don't see it making much sense for passenger vehicles.

[@OIOIOIIOOIOOOOOIOIOOOIII]

Filling up with hydrogen in seconds, sounds way better then waiting 8+ hours to charge a battery.

[@dfghdfzsd]

@@OIOIOIIOOIOOOOOIOIOOOIII 🗣️false

[@OIOIOIIOOIOOOOOIOIOOOIII]

srry imho it sounds better

[@Crabman_87]

and what tax breaks are propping up this supply chain changes??

[@InderjitSingh12]

nothing compared to tax breaks oil and gas industry gets

[@davidcunningham2074]

50pc by 2030! Not a chance! As EVs are not the answer!

[@dansanger5340]

It's already happening. Just look at rush hour traffic in Silicon Valley, the Seattle area, and other tech centers across the country. TONS of electric cars already. It just takes a while for the rest of the country to catch up. Remember how fast smart phones took over.

[@fetB]

@@dansanger5340 what he means is he doesnt want evs to be the answer

[@DJ-mj5pq]

Obviously this is exaggerated because most of the carbon neutral milage estimates for an EV are closer to 100k miles

[@matthewgoedtel5998]

Most estimates are incorrect.

[@marqbrown3777]

the problem is its probably still more expensive to recycle than making a new battery thats why nobody is recycling them

[@lawrencefrost9063]

Redwood Materials is on the right track.

[@AlenMajetic]

the opposite. It's been documented before that it's always significantly cheaper to recycle. Look it up before spreading false info

[@VRtechman]

I see that view count number alot! 🥵 Like the dang video please guys! 😅

[@kayakMike1000]

13,500 miles to carbon neutral? Horse manure. It's being plugged into a gas fired power plant.

[@JensSchraeder]

Or coal

[@ALCRAN2010]

Nuclear wind and solar have entered the chat.

[@EvilMmM]

poor kids from Congo...

[@2036scott]

Yeah! It's so bad... they won't have a job now, I suppose they will just have to go to school.

[@Byrro-edits]

Is Redwood a “green field “ site… pity they couldn’t recycle a building to recycle the batteries… (never mind the the guy who wants to send people to Mars mega factory carbon footprint)

[@silverflame2501]

Worthless if the coal industry never stop operating

[@thepvporg]

13,500 miles is misleading, it takes 80,000 miles before a car (EV) is carbon neutral. FACT.

[@matthewgoedtel5998]

Saying, "fact" doesn't make it so.

[@SpliffyMeister]

EVs keep piling up in the EV graveyards

[@guff9567]

There you go. Green lies.

[@SpliffyMeister]

worse pollution in the end.