- Electric-vehicle batteries could create up to 8 million tons of waste by 2040.
- A group of scientists in the US are researching cost-effective ways to recycle EV batteries.
- Meet 10 scientists leading the efforts for President Joe Biden's Department of Energy.
More people than ever are driving electric vehicles. By mid-2021, more than 2 million plug-in EVs had been sold in the US, according to Environment America. While that's a positive sign of progress toward a cleaner driving future, EVs bring with them a new environmental concern: battery waste. Without a recycling program, EV batteries could create 8 million tons of waste by 2040, according to Argonne National Laboratory.
That's why the Department of Energy launched the ReCell advanced-battery-recycling group in early 2019. The coalition of national laboratories and universities, with input from the battery industry, works on cost-effective ways to recycle lithium-ion batteries so critical components like cobalt and nickel don't go to waste.
"There are a lot of people working around the country and around the world to improve battery recycling. Each of them has a puzzle piece or a group of puzzle pieces, but most of them don't have the whole answer," Jeff Spangenberger, the director of ReCell, told Insider. "I like the idea of ReCell being a place where people can come with their puzzle pieces, and we can help connect them to other puzzle pieces to help put the picture together."
Recycling batteries isn't good for just the environment — it will also make the price of EVs go down, making EVs accessible to a wider population.
Bringing these costs down and making EVs more accessible will be an important piece of achieving electric-vehicle adoption goals set by the Biden administration. By 2030, President Joe Biden has said he wants zero-emission vehicles to represent half of all new-vehicle sales in the US. Last year, EVs accounted for about 3% of new-car sales.
Dozens of scientists at ReCell — which is made up of Argonne National Laboratory, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, the University of California, San Diego, and Michigan Technological University — are working to optimize EV-battery recycling. Here are 10 power players leading the team's efforts.
Jeff Spangenberger
Spangenberger is the director of ReCell and serves as the materials-recycling-group leader for Argonne National Laboratory. He focuses on solving material separation, recovery, and recycling challenges and has received four patents for this effort.
He leads Argonne's advanced-battery-recycling program, which focuses on creating cost-effective, sustainable recycling practices for batteries that have reached the end of their life. He's been at Argonne National Laboratory since 2002 and holds a bachelor's in chemical engineering from Iowa State University.
Bryant Polzin
Polzin is the deputy director of ReCell and serves as a process engineer for Argonne National Laboratory. His research focuses on developing lithium-ion batteries for transportation.
He joined Argonne in 2010 and established its electrode library, which contains anodes and cathodes that are distributed to university, industry, and national labs across the world for research.
Before coming to Argonne, Polzin worked as a material-science engineer for a startup that manufactured sapphires for LED production and as an application engineer for Peter Wolters. He holds a master's in materials science and metallurgical engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology.
Greg Halder
Halder is ReCell's business-development executive and an innovation and commercialization manager at Argonne National Laboratory. He joined Argonne in 2007 and was a program leader from 2010 to 2015. After getting his MBA from the University of Texas at Austin and working as a science and technology consultant, he rejoined Argonne for his current role in 2017.
Halder holds a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from the University of Sydney in Australia. As a postdoctoral fellow at Argonne, he developed X-ray-scattering techniques used to study the functional properties of molecular materials for energy-storage and carbon-capture uses.
Venkat Srinivasan
Srinivasan sits on ReCell's internal advisory board and works as the director of the Argonne Collaborative Center for Energy Storage Science, as well as the deputy director of the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research. His research focuses on next-generation battery development for vehicle and grid uses.
He came up with the idea for CalCharge, a public-private partnership between startups, established companies, research institutions, labs, and other stakeholders, to advance the EV, grid, and consumer-electronics markets.
Srinivasan joined Argonne in 2013 after spending 13 years as a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He holds a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of South Carolina.
Matt Keyser
Keyser sits on ReCell's internal advisory board and manages the electrochemical-energy-storage group at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado. There, his team focuses on battery-materials analysis and diagnostics, as well as optimizing energy-storage components.
Keyser joined the lab in 1992, where his research has covered many aspects of advanced vehicle technologies, including developing finite elemental thermal and structural models for hybrid EV components. He helped invent the lab's isothermal battery calorimeters, which help measure and manage the temperature in EV batteries. Keyser holds a bachelor's in mechanical engineering from the University of Colorado.
Ilias Belharouak
Belharouak is a member of ReCell's internal advisory board and serves as the head of the electrification section at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. He's an expert in applying battery research to a variety of projects, including EVs and renewable-energy storage.
He joined the Oak Ridge lab in 2017 after serving as the research director and founding chief scientist for the Electrochemical Energy Storage group, part of the Qatar Environment and Energy Research Institute, from 2013 to 2017. He also worked as a battery expert at Argonne National Laboratory from 2001 to 2013.
Belharouak has won multiple awards for his work in battery technology, including the US Federal Laboratory Consortium award for excellence in battery-technology transfer. He holds a master's and Ph.D. from the University of Bordeaux in France.
Jack Vaughey
Vaughey is the head of cathode recycling for ReCell, as well as a senior chemist and group leader at Argonne National Laboratory. He's been with the lab for 25 years and holds roughly 30 patents or patent applications for battery- and fuel-cell materials.
He received the Outstanding Mentor Award from the US Department of Energy in 2008 and was elected as a fellow for the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2018. He holds a Ph.D. in inorganic-materials chemistry from Northwestern University.
Kris Pupek
Pupek is the lead of other material recovery for ReCell. He serves as the group leader for process research and development at Argonne National Laboratory, where he's worked since 2010. Pupek also works as the group leader for the ScaleUp group in the lab's applied-materials division, which studies and develops new techniques for manufacturing advanced materials.
He earned his Ph.D. in organic chemistry and technology from the Institute of Organic Chemistry at the Polish Academy of Science.
Sheng Dai
Dai is a researcher for ReCell. He oversees chemical-research groups at Oak Ridge National Laboratory that focus on the chemistry and sciences around energy storage and material separation. His research has earned several awards, including the 2020 Max Bredig Award in Molten Salt and Ionic Liquid Chemistry, the 2019 ACS Award in Separations Science and Technology, and the 2018 IMMA Award given by International Mesostructured Materials Association. Dai is also a professor of chemistry at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.
Jaclyn Coyle
Coyle is a researcher for ReCell, with expertise in mechanical engineering. She has been a research scientist with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory since 2020, focusing on developing and characterizing next-generation lithium-ion-battery materials. She does her work on developing methods for recovery of high-value materials from used EV batteries through the ReCell consortium. Coyle holds degrees in mechanical engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the University of Colorado Boulder.