Researchers just discovered a new way to build an EV battery that makes it easy to break apart at the end of its lifespan.
Pro-tip: If you have “may have just cracked the code” in your hed, what you’re actually saying is they didn’t.
Now, you can argue until you’re blue in the face that this is some sort of leap forward, but when advances are actually made, the heds look quite a bit different. You know, declarative. I’m not saying that means industrial scale needs to be ready tomorrow, but this is a clickbait hed.
Competent media literacy means responding mentally to a “may” hed as meaning “but then again, it might not.”
Ok, so in reality the article says that they have made progress on how to glue together battery components to facilitate battery recycling (current solid state battery recycling is messy and complex), but that was a PoC, and they need to see if they can use the process to create high performing batteries.
It never was hard to recycle EV batteries.
First they can hold a ton of charge after the end of life of the vehicle, they can be rebuilt but they can always be dressed and sorted into metals etc. I think that process is like 90% efficient.
Also every ice car burns like 20 metric tons of fuel during its lifetime of which we get nothing back.
They talk at length about the current process and how energy intensive it is.
