WHEN A BATTERY MEETS ITS MAKER

End of life isn't necessarily the end of the story for electric car batteries, as Claire Evans finds out

- Claire Evans

We've all suffered the annoyance of the slow demise of a mobile phone battery, when it seems like you're spending more time charging it up every day than using it. The same thing will eventually happen to the much larger batteries in your electric vehicle (EV).

Car makers deem an EV battery to be at the end of its useful life when it drops to 70% of its original capacity; at this point, the range of the car it's powering is too far reduced. This point might be reached after 200,000 miles and between 10 and 20 years' of use. However, rather than being simply thrown away, batteries can be recycled, and this is something many car makers are gearing up for.

While several car manufacturers have started to plan battery recycling plants, or are busy exploring partnerships with other organisations that already do this type of work, Mercedes-Benz has plunged head first into the issue by constructing its own facility to recycle lithium ion batteries.

In October 2024, it opened a 6800 square metre site in Kuppenheim, southern Germany, that can reclaim up to 96% of the precious metals found in every EV battery module. Initially, the facility is running at a restricted capacity, but when it's fully operational in two to three years' time, it will be able to recycle 2500 tonnes of battery materials every year.

This makes Mercedes the first European car maker to undertake all the steps involved in battery recycling, from shredding (to separate plastic, aluminium, copper and iron) to extracting the rare earth minerals, which include cobalt, nickel and lithium. The facility is on the site of a former car body assembly factory and was built in just 18 months at a cost of nearly €50 million.