Technology
Batteries: The bedrock of the sustainable future
In this special episode of Chemistry in its Element, we explore the critical role of lithium-ion batteries in achieving a sustainable future. Partnering with Waters Corporation, we delve into the adva...
Batteries: The bedrock of the sustainable future
Technology •
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Hello and thank you to everybody who's been in touch about the chemistry in its element
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podcast over the last few weeks. We have had a slightly longer hiatus than planned, but
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we will be back with our usual weekly chemical storytelling very soon.
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In the meantime, this is a special podcast that we've produced in partnership with Waters
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as part of our sustainability collection, looking at how analytic characterization can be
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used to make better lithium ion batteries. It's not the sort of thing you usually get on this
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podcast channel, but it might be worth listening anyway to a little bit more about how these sorts
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of characterization techniques can make lithium ion batteries into the bedrock of a sustainable
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society. Give it a listen, let us know what you think, and then stay with us because chemistry
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in its element will be back to normal soon. Glad you're all still listening and thank you so much
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to everybody who's got in touch. Batteries and a sustainable future. A special podcast from
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chemistry world in partnership with Waters Corporation.
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We're in the midst of a climate crisis. In response, countries are pledging significant action to
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reduce their carbon emissions. The European Union intends to be carbon neutral by 2050, for example,
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and China by 2060. The Paris Climate Agreement was adopted by almost 200 parties in 2015,
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a bludging country is to set out their plans to reduce greenhouse emissions in increasingly
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ambitious five-year cycles. And carbon consciousness has also made its way into corporate culture,
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with organisations like BASF aiming for carbon neutral growth by 2030, and General Motors aiming for
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2040. When discussing large-scale carbon reduction, the focus is often on power generation,
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replacing fossil fuels with solar, wind or tidal energy, or on new technologies like carbon
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capture and storage. But for a truly sustainable future, we need a wider view.
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I'm Chris Stumpf, I work at Waters Corporation. I'm a senior manager and I focus on market
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development, and really when I've been looking at pretty extensively as of late is the area of
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electronics, and also sustainability. I've kind of developed the title of Green Ambassador within
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the company, because I'm tying in a lot of the electronics, especially lithium-ion batteries,
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because it connects into carbon neutrality, but also it connects into supporting sustainability
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goals of a lot of corporations and also a lot of countries around the world as they're trying to
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meet their carbon neutrality state of goals. Waters Corporation is the world's leading specialty
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measurement company. They don't make lithium-ion batteries or research new sustainable materials
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themselves, but they develop chromatography, mass spectrometry and thermal analysis techniques
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that enable scientists and industry worldwide to answer cutting-edge questions.
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I think there is a common thread with this, and I think a lot of this is really accelerated
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due to COVID-19, and what we've discovered is that the supply chains are being disrupted,
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and there's this need to be able to manufacture within countries and things like that. But a lot
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of the supply chain, as it stands now, is not kind of sustainable. So the ways that have
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reducing that are to use 5G, which enables the Internet of Things, which enables automated
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manufacturing, and also there's artificial intelligence, which can be focused directly on
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managing specific aspects of the supply chain and continuous manufacturing, things like that.
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But then the third thing is really the underlying technology for a lot of that is
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energy, and basically how do you store energy and use energy where it needs to be used.
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And one way to do that is with batteries, and specifically with lithium-ion batteries,
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they're the dominant battery type today. Currently they enable the electric cars, they enable
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the hybrid electric cars, and also they're used in the electric grid for smart grids.
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Their use is going to be very pervasive across the landscape. In addition, they're heavily used
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in consumer electronics, you know, our smartphones and our laptops, and all these types of
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devices that we use nowadays. While all of these technologies play a role in fostering development,
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and reducing our reliance on existing outdated infrastructure, batteries perhaps seem the least
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exciting on the list. It's only about 30 years since the first commercial lithium-ion battery,
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but in that time they've become ubiquitous, commonplace, even forgettable.
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AI and the 5G, they receive a lot of publicity. They're even in like top culture. You could think
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about Stephen King's novel, The Cell, based on like creating zombies with cell phone towers and
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things like that. And then Stephen Spielberg had a movie in 2001 based on artificial intelligence
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and creating like a human person. But right now what we basically have is this, I guess,
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taking for granted this lithium-ion battery technology. It's everywhere. It's in our laptops,
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it's in our cell phones. And there's still a lot to be done. So the Nobel Prize winners in 2019,
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for the Nobel Prize in chemistry, good enough, winning ham and Yoshino San, they said there's
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six things that still need to be done with regards to research, reducing the cost, improving the
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safety, increasing the charge density. For example, if you're going to put these lithium-ion batteries
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in an airplane or you're going to put them in a big tractor trailer truck or something like that,
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you need a lot more energy density. And then there's the idea that is the lithium-ion battery technology
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as it's being practiced today with the liquid electrolyte fluid and the cathode and anode.
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Is that the right approach or do we go with another type of technology? Do we use solid state, for
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example, or do we replace the electrodes with other types of technology? For example, the lithium and
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a cobalt that are in the anode and the cathode are not really that sustainable. It's a bit difficult
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to justify this from a sustainability perspective. Could you perhaps replace some of that with more
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common metals like sodium or something like that? So there's really a lot of opportunity here
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for really basic R&D just to kind of decide which direction we go and which is the most commercially
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viable option. Sustainability means different things to different people. For a business strategy to
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be sustainable, it needs to ensure profits are greater than costs. But this can conflict with
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the environmental bottom line, ensuring no environmental or ecological damage to sustain the natural
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world for generations to come. Taking a global view, the United Nations has set out 17 sustainable
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development goals, which include affordable and clean energy, climate action and responsible
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consumption and production alongside gender equality, sanitation, peace and justice.
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In addition to a clean environment, they also want to promote civil stability because they want
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to minimize this extreme wealth inequality, basically reduce the possibilities of war.
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So with regards to lithium ion batteries, being within that framework of sustainability and
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trying to source your materials plays a little bit of part into that kind of 17 development goals
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of the United Nations. If we think about the Paris climate treaty, if we can maintain our carbon
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emissions to like 1990 levels, then we can arrest the increase in the Earth's temperature. Basically,
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that justifies the investment in all this R&D for lithium ion battery and all the products that it's
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going into. Yoshino San talked about lithium ion batteries kind of being the bedrock of the sustainable
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society. But there's other things that we don't quite realize until we get to that world of having
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a lot of our consumer electronics and our cars and our airplanes and things like that running on
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lithium ion batteries or another alternative to lithium ion batteries. It's an enabling technology.
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It's playing a small part in this overall scheme of sustainability. It's not the only thing
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that's going to help with this because it's kind of a hybrid situation where we have lots of
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things that we need to do in order to reach a sustainable future, but it's kind of the foundation
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of that, in my opinion. If batteries are to be the bedrock of the sustainable society,
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it's vital that we understand how to tailor them to specific uses. The battery in your laptop
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is a very different specification to the ones in the latest electric cars.
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This is where measurement technologies come into their own, helping with everything from
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Blue Skies Research to efficient manufacture. Hi, my name is Neil Tomaris. I am a product manager
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for micro-calorie-metry products. So batteries are, because it's a contained non-moving,
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you can think of it as a machine almost. It's a complex device. There's not a lot of techniques
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that can be used to study wholesale batteries. A lot of them are destructive techniques,
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having a test that you can use to look at the chemicals separately, but also look at wholesale
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batteries is important. So that's where caliber machine really has a very important contribution
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to the research field. Another thing researchers are also starting to look at bringing in some of the
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tools that bio-pharmaceutical sciences are using because of the sensitivity. So, HPL
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and mass spectrometry, there's also cryoEM. That's another technique that's historically used
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just in protein science. Now it's being kind of carried over into material characterization
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for batteries. As the batteries change and the performance demands accelerate, that's where they're
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drawing in some of these tools that wouldn't traditionally be used by chemical engineers or chemists.
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There's not a one-size-fits-all battery, and so there's going to be a lot of research to
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determine how best to build certain batteries for certain applications. You can think about safety
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and maybe energy density or something like that. So, in order to think about that as far as an
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analytical characterization perspective, you have to go back and think about the battery itself.
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There's four primary things that you have to think about when you think about a battery. So there's
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anode in the cathode and we're all familiar with our own batteries. We'll see the terminals
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of the batteries. That is basically the anode in the cathode. Inside there is the electrolytes. So
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there's additives and all this kind of stuff. That is put in there partly to enhance the performance
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of the battery, but it's also put in there to suppress potential fires and things like that.
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And then on the inside there is actually a polymer separator. Its purpose is basically to
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prevent a short circuit between anode and cathode. If you actually have a short circuit,
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if that little polymer gets punctured or if it shrinks, the battery gets hot very quickly.
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And so if the battery gets hot very quickly, it can cascade because a lot of times these cars
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will have thousands of these batteries in a battery pack. And it can cascade like dominoes.
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So the calorimetry can tell you how fast the reaction is happening, how much of the reactions
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happening, even the fact that there is a reaction happening. So a researcher might have some
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structural data of a picture of their material, their chemistry if they were going to cut open a
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battery or before it even gets into the battery. Calimetry tells you how do all those components
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together react? Are there reactions in there that we don't want? We're measuring heat, do those
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reactions get too hot? The chemistry that goes into the battery is going to help the charge density,
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it's going to help the battery life cycle, safety is also something that can be looked on early on
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in the R&D process of make sure that chemicals are compatible. High precision
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calamity is another technique that's paired with calorimetry to understand these parasitic reactions.
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These are the small minute reactions that researchers want to understand because it points directly
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to how good their battery is going to be. But you also got the capabilities of really understanding
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the chemistry that's going on and all these side reactions. And these side reactions basically
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rob the battery of its main goodness, the power that it's generating. And so if you can understand that
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from a molecular perspective with techniques such as mass spectrometry or maybe the whole battery
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itself, battery calorimetry, then you can really get to understand how you can actually maybe make
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this battery last 20 years, 40 years, 100 years. Fine tuning the chemistry within a battery isn't
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enough to make a perfect product. The right battery case is essential to allowing that chemistry
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to work in situ. To confirm a case won't collapse in the real world, researchers use techniques like
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thermogravimetric analysis or TGA. By applying heat to a material in a controlled way,
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they can precisely measure not just physical deformation, but chemical changes that would indicate
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degradation or oxidation. So the casing is actually very important so the polymer that's made out
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of if a car runs into something and it impacts and kind of crushes that casing,
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well you'd like to actually make a casing that's kind of somewhat resistant to that.
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So if you can design a casing and use analytical characterization in order to build that polymer so
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that it it resists that. And also the electrolyte on the inside, if you can put the right
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attitudes in there that if the things does start to heat up, it can trigger some type of
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flame repression. So there's a number of these things that you can do from an analytical perspective
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to kind of build a high performing battery that that has a lot of the energy performance that you
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want. But at the same time, you you got to think about the safety perspectives as well.
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One essential component of a sustainable future highlighted by the United Nations
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goal of responsible consumption and production centers around what happens to a product at the end
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of its useful life. Electronic waste is a growing problem. The UN estimated 50 million tons was
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reported in 2018 and levels are expected to double by 2050. This includes complex equipment that
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is hard to recycle and can contain components that are toxic or hard to replace, creating a vicious
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circle whereby materials are mined in environmentally damaging ways only to be returned to landfill
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in just a few years. With batteries as with other electronic components, research and characterization
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can help us to reduce reuse and recycle. There's a lot of work going on into understanding recycling.
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I mean, Apple is one of the largest recyclers and batteries in the world. It's no surprise.
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They have batteries and all of their devices. I'm sure they want those back and they have a process
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that they might be able to recycle some or all of the battery. There's lots of other techniques
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but understanding how do you take something that's a static machine full of chemicals? How do you
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take it apart? How do you recycle these small little pieces? There's some initiatives or research
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that just goes into like we're going to grind up the battery and try to purify certain parts of it
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by just making it small and smaller and mechanically. Others open up a battery extract certain materials
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but I think it is a big challenge understanding how how batteries are going to be recycled. What's the
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best way to do that? I don't think it necessarily fits our current recycling process how we know it
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of separate it's easy to separate like trash with batteries. It's a lot more complex. Right now,
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there's regulations in order to collect these batteries because we don't want them to get into
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waste stream but as far as collecting enough material to reuse it, I think the amount of electric
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cars are actually not high enough to make that economically feasible. There's two major areas that
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people look at with regards to recycling the batteries. The first is relatively straightforward. You
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take it out of the car and it's in some type of a casing. You open that case up and there's all
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these individual battery cells and you can test each one of those cells and you can pull out the
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ones that are bad and then you can replace them with good ones and then you can repurpose that
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battery pack either by putting it back into another car or you can put it into a smart grid and
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maybe the smart grid's energy requirements are maybe not as aggressive as what the car is so it
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actually might last a lot longer in electric grid. So there's that basically is kind of a
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reconditioning of the battery. Then the second one is to take that battery pack out of the car
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or the cell phone or whatever and and basically open up the battery pack, take out the cells and
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then grind them up and then try to separate things into cobalt magnesium lithium and all this
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and try to get back to virgin materials and so that's another area where you need an
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local characterization you need mass spectrometry NMR TGA DSC all these types of techniques in order to
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just understand the the physical property and the molecular properties of this and see if you've
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actually gotten yourself back to where you want to be. Pure virgin materials have fairly well
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understood properties but when a material has been reclaimed from a disused battery we need to
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be certain that it will behave in the same way before it returns to the manufacturing process.
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With many companies operating on a financial knife edge the risks of using recycled or reclaimed
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materials that may contain impurities can be too much to bear. Without the analytical characterization
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without the molecular understanding of the anode and the cathode material and the electrolyte
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and the polymer materials that the the battery cells made out of without that molecular
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understanding and then also there is the physical understanding with a TGA you can actually take
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that polymer and you can melt it with a thermoplastic you need to know when these polymers melt
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because that's part of the manufacturing process. You melt these polymers and then you blow mold them
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or you do different types of manufacturing with them but you need to be able to understand that
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because if the temperature shifted somehow then it's not going to work in the existing manufacturing
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process so you're going to have to do all this adaptation. So really understanding do I still have
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that same polymer or has it degraded somehow if you take that polymer that say that was in a battery
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maybe you use it in a different application maybe you use it in a carbomper. What that polymer now
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is brittle and it's going to break right away. It's not going to be a good application in a car
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because you know you need that bumper to kind of resist that impact. So absolutely analytical
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characterization across that whole from the very beginning of making a battery to kind of the
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circular economy and reusing the components you got to understand that from each step of that
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process. So as we collectively try to find ways to adapt to a challenging future to meet the
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ambitious targets that we set for our varying definitions of sustainability. It's essential that
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we use every tool available to us to probe, analyze and understand the technology that we take
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for granted and with that understanding we'll be able to build and rebuild better batteries
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that can realise it. Kiri Ashino's vision of them has the bedrock of a sustainable society.
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For more on this topic check out the new chemistry world sustainability collection curated
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content created with our partners. You can find that at chemistryworld.com slash sustainability.
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This podcast featured Chris Stumpf and Neil Demass of Waters and was produced in partnership
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with Waters Corporation. I'm Ben Valsler from chemistryworld. Thank you for joining me.