Chris Dragan's Corner

We’re witnessing our civilization undergo another significant revolution. We’re departing from extracting energy from fossil fuels in favor of harvesting energy from renewable sources. Majority of “clean energy” solutions rely on storing energy in batteries.

Car manufacturers are slowly transitioning to electric cars. Yet a few biggest ships create more pollution than all the cars in the world. To remedy this, Rolls-Royce (the engine company, not the luxury car company) announced a new battery system for ships. Eventually, in a few decades, we will produce a few orders of magnitude more batteries than today to store energy in cars, ships and houses.

The transition to electric engines and renewable energy is great for our planet, still one problems remains to be solved: batteries have limited lifetime. What is going to happen with all the mountains of batteries we will produce to replace dirty combustion engines?

One researcher developed a way to recycle used Li-Ion batteries. Reportedly around 97% of Li-Ion batteries end up piling up in landfills, which would become a huge problem in a few decades.

Should the cost of recycling batteries be included in the price of new products?