Lyft Says It Will Start Recycling E-Bike and Scooter Batteries

Lyft plans to start out recycling its e-bike and scooter batters by means of a newly introduced partnership with Redwood Materials, as first reported by The Verge. Lyft owns 12 different municipal bike share applications—like New York City’s Citi Bike and San Francisco’s Bay Wheels—along with its scooter program in 4 cities.

As Lyft’s largest microtransport share, Citi Bike alone has 5,000 electrical bicycles, in keeping with a report from Bloomberg. Which is a whole lot of batteries. E-Bike batteries only last a few years, and after that typically simply turn out to be a part of the rising pile of e-waste that threatens to finally engulf us. So it is smart that the rideshare firm is aiming to do one thing totally different.

Redwood Materials was began in 2017 by former Tesla government, Jeffrey “JB” Straubel. It initially started as only a recycling facility, however introduced its intentions to increase into battery supplies manufacturing in 2021—in a bid to spearhead a domestic, circular U.S. battery economy. And its first manufacturing facility, slated to make usable cathode and anode foils, is reportedly near completion in Nevada, according to MIT Technology Review.

Since its begin, Redwood Materials has shortly grown and has current partnerships with Tesla and its pending Panasonic battery plant below building in Kansas—in addition to with Ford, Toyota, Nissan, Amazon, and different main firms.

In Lyft’s partnership, the corporate mentioned it’s going to acquire its drained batteries and ship them to Redwood’s new Nevada facility. There, Redwood advised the Verge it’s going to chemically recycle what it may possibly, stripping the precious metals like copper and cobalt out of the trashed batteries to be reintegrated into future batteries—probably even for automobiles. “We collect 130 e-bike batteries, we’ve got enough battery metals to make a new EV battery,” Jackson Switzer, a Redwood Materials government, advised the Verge.

Redwood Materials claims all of its recycling is finished domestically, and in the event that they efficiently handle to remodel batteries from useless waste to reborn energy sources, they’ll be a pacesetter amongst U.S. recyclers. But lofty targets apart, it’s value noting that Redwood Materials has but to show how its closed-loop system works. It hasn’t but created new cathode and anode materials out of recycled scraps at scale, and it’s unclear what proportion of these new supplies might be constituted of the previous. Its new manufacturing facility is slated to be completed by the tip of this yr, in keeping with MIT Tech Review. 

And hopefully, the corporate does ship as promised. The present recycling stream for batteries and different e-waste is deeply damaged. So a lot in order that Uber once landfilled thousands of e-bikes as a result of it was “too complicated” to search out an alternate resolution.

Often, useless batteries are amassed and shipped abroad the place they languish and cause environmental contamination. Yet, for the atmosphere and for the rising battery-based technological increase, we desperately want a greater system. Without efficient and considerably elevated recycling, we merely gained’t have sufficient supplies to produce battery demand (and even that most likely gained’t suffice.)