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Video length: 4 min
Automotive: the challenge of recycling electric batteries
Emmanuel Macron will announce new foreign investments on Monday May 13, particularly in the battery manufacturing sector. Finland is already thinking about the next step, that of recycling.
(France 2)
Emmanuel Macron will announce new foreign investments on Monday May 13, particularly in the battery manufacturing sector. Finland is already thinking about the next step, that of recycling.
This is the downside of the electric car: the battery with its rare metals, pollutants to produce. So, Europe set itself an objective: to recycle them to reuse the metals they contain. But factories that know how to do this are rare, one of the only operational ones is in Finland. The first step in recycling is to empty all the energy contained in the batteries, the operation is delicate because some can be defective and catch fire.
A battery factory soon in France?
The batteries are then dismantled and the waste recycled. The metals are crushed and only the black mass is retained. Black mass contains graphite, nickel, cobalt, lithium and even manganese. Fortum, the Finnish cousin of EDF, is a champion of renewables and a European pioneer in battery recycling. France would like to install a gigantic battery recycling plant in the north of the country, in Dunkirk.
