by Ariel Miller, ESRAG Newsletter Editor
Join the Nationwide Recycling Effort and Boost Sustainability
American Clubs have an unprecedented opportunity to accelerate the recovery of lithium, cobalt, copper, and nickel from the lithium-ion batteries that consumers discard in the United States. In April, 2024 ESRAG and Redwood Materials published a website with instructions and marketing materials to make it seamless for clubs to organize recycling events for rechargeable electric devices that abound in American households, from electric toothbrushes to power tools.
Currently only 5% of the lithium-ion batteries in the US are recycled.
By signing up your Club, you can help vastly improve that statistic as we work together to expand lithium-ion recycling awareness and action across the entire nation through the vast network of Rotary, Rotaract, and Interact clubs. ESRAG has already succeeded in organizing collection events in 15 of the 50 states, and has worked with Redwood to streamline the process so it can be rapidly expanded.
ESRAG’s role in lithium-Ion Battery Recycling
Battery Recycling Drive
The resources ESRAG and Redwood have developed include posters, social media templates, volunteer forms, news releases, and a safety video. Redwood is developing agreements with retailers to serve as drop-off sites, and is organizing systems for safely delivering devices to the recycling plant at no cost to consumers.
“Climate change is creating a global imperative to electrify and accelerate the reduction of fossil fuels. Batteries are the solution, yet critical metals move 50,000+ miles before they reach a cell factory – a costly and unsustainable process,” explains Redwood, currently the only U.S. manufacturer equipped to process batteries from consumer products other than electric vehicles. Redwood estimates that demand for lithium-ion batteries will grow 500% in the next decade.
“Batteries can be infinitely recycled with 95% of the materials recovered to build the next generation of EVs and energy storage,” the company adds. Rechargeable devices are a fast-growing part of the US solid waste stream, with most consumers keeping their devices only three years. Americans discard over 150 million cell phones a year. “As Redwoods founder JB Straubel says, ‘the largest lithium and cobalt mine in the world is the junk drawers of Americans,'” says ESRAG Vice-Chair Clari Nolet, who launched and leads ESRAG’s partnership with Redwoods.
She cites three goals for ESRAG’s lithium-ion recycling project:
- Increasing domestic supply chain security: currently most of the lithium we use in batteries is imported
- Reducing mining pollution, the huge carbon footprint of extracting and transporting these metals, and the humanitarian harm of child labor.
- Safety: collecting and recycling the batteries prevents them ending up in landfills where they can collide with forklifts and spark large and sometimes fatal fires.
“When clubs hold events they can easily follow some simple safety rules to collect and fill approved transportation boxes and drums. Redwood provides all the collection containers and they pay to transport the batteries to their facility,” Nolet adds.
Nolet sees lithium-ion battery recycling as a potential ” polio campaign of the environmental Area of Focus:” an opportunity for taking the circular economy to scale as part of desperately-needed climate action.
Lithium-ion batteries recycling guide
Because of our network of clubs engaging volunteers of all ages, Rotary is ideally positioned to help Redwood reach its goals of building a closed-loop domestic supply chain that will recover enough cathode and anode for one million EVs a year by 2025, and five million a year by 2030. Redwood is opening a second plant in South Carolina in a region known as “battery alley,” she adds. “Many EV battery manufacturers are there, so they want to be close to their consumer.”
Redwood Materials’ expanding capacity fits what Clari Nolet was seeking: a way to leverage Rotary’s “boots on the ground” to rapidly scale up a solution to an urgent environmental challenge: the transition away from fossil fuels.
Clari Nolet shared the story of her personal Rotary odyssey in an interview with ESRAG Director Felix Kimani and Rotaractor Ilya Admiral Shcharbitski in their July 2, 2024 ESRAG podcast. She joined the Rotary Club of Los Altos in Northern California just a few years ago, and discovered that a group of Rotarians had organized ESRAG and were planning to exhibit and meet at the 2017 Rotary Convention in Atlanta. Yearning to work on high-impact climate solutions, she traveled across the country and started networking with ESRAG leaders.
“The issue that I have – especially in environmental – is that so many of the projects are very local,” she explained. “ESRAG is a great umbrella for also doing projects that are scalable and projects that can much bigger, because there is an emphasis now in partnering with organizations outside of Rotary. The problems facing the environment are so huge: oftentimes a global grant isn’t going to touch the problem. And so I think we have to look at this differently and partner with big organizations that can use Rotary’s help to address a problem.”
Building a Circular Economy
In searching for a scalable project, Nolet reached out to Sally Benson, a professor of energy resources engineering at Stanford University in nearby Palo Alto. She learned that Benson was working with Redwood Materials, which had been founded by JB Straubel, a veteran of Tesla.
Working with Redwood’s Sonja Koch, Clari Nolet developed the initial Rotary-Redwood pilot project with three California Rotary Clubs – Los Altos, Cupertino, and San Jose – during the pandemic. “These drives were incredibly successful,” she reports, but they quickly discovered that the public knew very little about lithium-ion batteries. For example, “we got a weed-whacker without the battery, when all we wanted was the battery,” she laughs.
Because it’s dangerous and illegal to transport lithium-ion batteries by plane, recycling depends on having a qualified facility within reach by land or water transport at an affordable cost. That is why ESRAG is starting with the United States, where Redwood has one plant in the West and is adding a second in the Southeast.
But through ESRAG’s strong international network, Clari Nolet is talking with Rotarians in India, Canada, and Mexico about the potential to replicate the project, inviting them to do the research to find partners like Redwood with the ability to recover and refine all the strategic metals in lithium-ion batteries. This circular economy project has huge appeal for young people, with the most successful drives to date achieved by Interact Clubs in Maryland.
Explore the website and reach out to the team by emailing [email protected]. You can also consult Clari Nolet at [email protected]
