Battery tech is advancing so quickly that when you recycle a battery at end of life you can get greater than 100% of the original battery's capacity from the same materials, more than offsetting losses due to the recycling process.
"The new Mercedes-Benz battery recycling plant has an annual capacity of 2,500 tonnes. The recovered materials feed into the production of more than 50,000 battery modules for new all-electric Mercedes-Benz models. So it’s a modest start, but Mercedes plans to scale up production volumes and expand recycling capacities."<p>A modest start? If that corresponds to 50k new battery modules then wouldn't that also be approximately the same number of five- or ten-year old modules? That should be a sizable share of what Mercedes-Benz sold at the time.
Wow, they are getting down into the innards of the batteries. I was not expecting MB to specialize further than integrating individual 18650 or similar type cells into a battery pack.
This may be a dumb question: What is a battery module? Is it a single cell of which hundreds get combined for a single car battery, or is it a group of cells of which less than a dozen get put together for a car battery? Or is it 1 module per car? If it's 1 module per car are they just saying "this recycling will go into all the new cells we make this year"?
..."Mercedes says its hydrometallurgical process is less intensive in terms of energy consumption and material waste.""... so how much (clean) water does it consume e.g. per car-battery reprocessed?<p>Not to take away from this being good news, but clean water is also a scarce resource.