You will be surprised to know what will happen to old VinFast batteries 

Electric-Car Battery Recycling 

The article below is based on the actual trip of JerryRigEverything in Li-Cycle manufactory. 

Because of the huge size, EV battery recycling company like Li-Cycle use large automated machinery. This also helps to ensure the safety of workers when working with large objects and heavy metals. After the batteries are ground up, they go from a charge state into a completely inert state. There are no electricity in the materials after the blender. The mixture will be passed through a stream, where the plastic will be vibrated up and transferred to a separate tank. 

But what matters is what happened to Lithium, the cobalt and other metals? After the electric vehicle battery is dropped into the shredder, it gets ground up into small metal flakes which sink to the bottom of the tank and get conveyered up and out of the liquid. Coming out of the vibrator we have aluminum, steel, copper, and sometimes even some sweet metals that come off the circuit boards such as gold, palladium, all collected in bags to be recycled later.  

With how valuable and useful these internal materials are, no one should be throwing them in a landfill. The way the cobalt and lithium are extracted from that proprietary liquid inside the shredder machine is with something called a filter press. The metal-rich liquid is pumped into the large blue press and that proprietary liquid is hydraulically squeezed out leaving behind something called black mass on each of the individual filters. The black mass is what’s falling down the chute as each of the filters are shaken, and is what contains all of our converted elements, and is that contains all of the coveted elements.  

The black mass has been valuable enough to be called “the new gold”. It really is the most valuable part of the entire process and what Li-Cycle is after. It’s a vital ingredient in making new batteries. 

Interestingly, to operate this system, Li-Cycle had to use tons of water. However, this is a closed process and not a single drop of water is released. At the factory, there is no gaseous waste released into the environment because no materials are burned. 

Stream of Critical Materials 

After the batteries have been shredded, sorted, filtered and pressed, there are 3 commodities left. One bag is full of plastics that came from the floating off the top of the liquid. Then, one bag is aluminum and copper shredded down to the bottom. And lastly, one bag with a coveted black mass. And this is where we find the cobalt, the lithium, the nickel. The elemental metals can be infinitely recycled and 95% of the batteries that go through this system are collected in one of these 3 bags. VinFast batteries are extremely recyclable and Li-Cycle’s doing it in the US.