When my old car died, I sold it to my local mechanic for cash. I don’t know what happened to it afterward. Drivers don’t really have to think about that.
But there is a whole industry that does, and it’s pretty efficient.
“Eighty-six percent of a vehicle by weight is either reused, repurposed, recycled or the parts go down to remanufacturing,” said Emil Nusbaum, vice president of strategy, government and regulatory affairs for the Automotive Recyclers Association.
But electric vehicles are different from gasoline-powered cars. They don’t have metal engines or traditional gearboxes. Their batteries have complicated components. These cars can’t just be thrown into the existing recycling system.
“I had a tow truck operator who reached out to us,” Nusbaum said. “He had a crash-damaged Tesla. The vehicle is essentially just a lot of carbon and metal. And unfortunately, this tow truck operator has nowhere to send this battery or this vehicle at this point.”
Nusbaum said the Tesla is currently just sitting at a facility waiting for a solution. Now, one totaled EV isn’t a major waste issue. But Tesla first hit the market 16 years ago. The supply of retired EVs is coming, and it will probably come faster every year. There were more than 3 million EVs on U.S. roads last year. It could be 10 times that many by 2030.
“We don’t have a huge problem, per se, right now on the recycling end, but it will be a problem in the future if we don’t take steps to ensure that there’s a process in place to recover these batteries,” said Nicole Hutchinson, state policy director with the clean transportation nonprofit Calstart.
EVs are great from a carbon-reduction standpoint, but the batteries can be dangerous to dispose of and they contain materials that require a lot of resources to produce. That’s why California lawmakers think it’s important to get as much life out of them as possible, so important that they just passed a bill essentially forcing battery manufacturers to do just that.
“This policy prevents environmental impacts on the front end by reducing a reliance on virgin materials, and it also reduces environmental harm on the back end by ensuring that we don’t have hazardous waste in our landfills,” Hutchinson said.
The bill’s author, state Sen. Ben Allen, said it would put EV battery suppliers on the hook to repair, repurpose and, eventually, recycle batteries.
“It forces the producer to actually spend some time thinking about the end of life of the product,” he said.
Allen also said the bill has implications beyond state borders. If manufacturers have to recycle batteries in the most populous state, he said, they’ll build them differently, “which will make it so much easier when a car is brought into the shop. You make it easy to extract, you make it easy to separate, you make it easy to refurbish, you make it easy to recycle,” he said.
The legislation attempts to standardize what Allen called an inefficient, Wild West recycling industry. The Automotive Recyclers Association is on board. So are environmental advocates. But the automotive trade groups are mixed. After all, the manufacturers would bear a lot of the responsibility.
The Alliance for Automotive Innovation declined an interview with Marketplace but said in an email that it opposed the bill. John Moffatt spoke to a Legislature committee on behalf of the trade association this summer.
“Let the market do its thing. It is out there working,” said Moffatt. “Many, if not most, of my member companies already have contracts with other entities out to make the secondary use of these batteries once they’re done in the vehicle.”
The state’s auto repair shops are neutral, per Dave Kusa of the Automotive Service Councils of California. Kusa runs his own garage.
“I’m a small shop. We may do two hybrid batteries a month, maybe. OK, so I have two pieces of paper to fill out. Big deal,” he said.
He estimated that’s less than 2% of the cars that come through his shop. Because, Kusa said, EVs just don’t fail that often.
