TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
Popular Reads
Top Results
No results found. Please check your search term and try again
Can't find what you're looking for?
View all search results
Popular Reads
Top Results
No results found. Please check your search term and try again
Can't find what you're looking for?
View all search resultsCar battery recycling market gears up for future boom
As Europe shifts gear from fossil fuel vehicles to electrified cars, recycling graphite as well as other elements in batteries is gradually becoming a major focus.
Change text size
Gift Premium Articles
to Anyone
Share the best of The Jakarta Post with friends, family, or colleagues. As a subscriber, you can gift 3 to 5 articles each month that anyone can read—no subscription needed!
French scientist Anna Vanderbruggen mixes chemicals with a pipette into the graphit recycling system in the Helmholtz Institute Freiberg for Resource Technology in Freiberg, eastern Germany on February 27, 2023. (AFP/Jens Schlueter)
R
esearcher Anna Vanderbruggen peers into a vat of dark bubbling liquid, the result of a process she has developed to recover graphite from old lithium-ion batteries.
Although graphite represents up to a quarter of the weight of the batteries, no one has yet come up with a viable plan to recycle it, according to Vanderbruggen.
The 29-year-old researcher is still fine-tuning her method but has already received an award from the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) for her efforts.
As Europe shifts gear from fossil fuel vehicles to electrified cars, recycling graphite as well as other elements in batteries is gradually becoming a major focus.
All the more so as the continent seeks to wean itself off its reliance on countries like China for raw materials.
"Battery manufacturers were not interested" in recycled graphite up to now because "they could get it at low cost in China", Vanderbruggen told AFP.
Her method, developed at the Helmholtz Research Institute in Freiberg, Germany, involves extracting graphite from "black mass", a powder that also contains cobalt, nickel, lithium and manganese.
More from The Weekender
Show up, show off and call it self-care: Strong is the new flex
With toned arms as the new status symbol, maybe it’s time we rethink why we come to the gym and pick up those dumbbells.
When a friend becomes a stranger: Healing after a platonic breakup
We expect heartbreak in romance, but no one warns us how much it hurts when a friendship falls apart.
The power of small acts: Glimmers of hope from 2025
In a year marked by despair, it was small, human acts that broke through the noise, reminding us that hope doesn’t vanish. It’s passed hand to hand, one person to another.
