283 The Battery Recycling Episode

Gary Comerford (: 00:00

Hi, I'm Gary and this is EV Musings, a podcast about renewables, electric vehicles and things that are interesting to electric vehicle owners. And on the show today, we'll be looking at battery recycling.

Our main topic of discussion today is battery recycling and this is the second in a short series on batteries I'm running this season. These episodes should be listened to in partnership with episode 264 from last season.

content to new batteries from: 2030

find interesting so I thought I'd ask and see.

Well, the response was quite overwhelming. An email flooded in saying they thought this would be a good idea. Actually, there were several emails all thinking this was what they wanted, but more than I imagined. So here we are. So let's chat to someone who works in the sector.

Robin (: 01:23

I'm Robin Brundle. I'm executive chairman of Technology Minerals PLC, executive chairman of Recyclers Group Limited, and also on the board of trustees of the Faraday Institution. So essentially for the last six years, I've been focused on the lithium-ion battery vertical and the full circularity of exploration.

of raw minerals all the way through recycling and reuse back into lithium ion

Gary Comerford (: 01:54

let's move on and talk a little bit about Recyclers. What does it do as a company?

Robin (: 01:54

Yeah, I... Yeah, sure.

So we set off on our journey about seven years ago now, my business partner Alex Stambury and I, and we could see that there was going to be a big gap in the lithium-ion battery space, both for the raw minerals, given the hold that China had on global and still has on global supply of raw materials, and secondly then on the recycling to recapture those minerals.

's been processing since July: 2023

And at the start of the journey, we knew that we had to be chemistry agnostic so that we're able to process anything from a button cell in a vape through electric toothbrush, mobile phone, laptops, e-bikes, cars, trains, forklift trucks, and of course, energy storage systems. And we set about doing this and quickly realized that

we had got to create and design our own plant. So using the West Midlands capabilities, traditional recycling capabilities, along with the very latest knowledge and understanding of chemistry, we designed and built our own 22,000 ton per year plant, which is operational in Wolverhampton and still operating at scale today and growing, which is great.

So we are a solution provider to every sector that's using lithium-ion batteries and more importantly the work that we've done over the last five or six years that we have now created that circle. using partners abroad at the moment, we'll perhaps touch on this in a moment, but having to send some of our raw material abroad,

We can now do the final separation to get the battery material back into purity that will go into making a new battery. So we've achieved that. And where we go from here is to take costs out of that process and to take carbon footprint by not having to ship it abroad. So we're working hard to give this full circularity capability to the UK. And that has a huge

and a much wider impact because the automotive space is tasked with using recycled material in the manufacture of their batteries effectively for the automotive space. And I use automotive because clearly they're the biggest by volume user of lithium ion batteries. But if they can't get their raw materials here in the UK, they will of course.

go to where they can, which means that they will go into Europe or into Asia to do their production and manufacturing. And the economic impact of the supply chain, of the technology, of academia links with Formula One, with automotive, will potentially be broken if we lose this capability. And that's the flow chain, but of course the economics of that.

of those people not working, for example, and the taxation that comes from the automotive space. So we play a really critical role in producing recycled material to help attract and retain automotive manufacturing in the UK. And of course, you know, our big push over the next two to three years is to get cost out of those programs to make sure that we can at least compete with China.

on the supply of raw materials because it's no good us getting this process going and then presenting the UK gigafactories with material that's three times the price of that that they can buy from China. So we've come an awfully long way on the journey in six years that we've been working. And within the next two years, you'll see those final parts of the circular economy

being cost out and effective here in the UK.

Gary Comerford (: 06:10

Well, you pretty much answered all the questions that I was going to ask. So thank you for that. No, I'm only joking. We'll come back and talk about some of those things in detail, but I just want to pose. It's almost a philosophical question. And there is a perception.

Robin (: 06:17

Sure.

Gary Comerford (: 06:22

in certain parts of the media and amongst a lot of the electrical vehicle naysayers that EV batteries are a kind of a disposable thing. mean, the number of times I've heard people talk about this mythical Schrodinger's battery, it's both too expensive to replace, but it's cheap enough to throw into landfill after three years. Do you have any idea where that myth came from?

Robin (: 06:43

In commerce, you will always have those that will have advantage by not supporting a latest technology. And so, you know, and we've seen it in all of our lifetimes. You know, when we, those of us that are old enough to remember when we even transitioned in the 80s from leaded to unleaded fuel, you know, they were the naysayers there. But they were probably those whose engines wouldn't run on unleaded fuel, for example.

So you will always find that. And I think to pick up on a couple of nuances in your question. The first is that we must all avoid at all costs putting any of this material back into landfill. Firstly, there's harm to humans and harm to environment is the first priority there to stop that from happening. And then of course, there is the recycled element of this, as I've just said, is

The carbon footprint of a recycled battery that can be retained here in the UK to make new, we believe is around 60 % less carbon footprint than extracting virgin material from the DRC, shipping it to China, processing it, shipping it back around the world to assemble batteries for propulsion effectively.

We don't support that theory and because we are evidencing that we've got this circularity, those that are in the camp that you mentioned should really have a look at the advances that have been made. One great example is that if you look at those early EV vehicles, the way in which we recycle their batteries now, academia are reporting to government that it's better to recycle

than to second life them because the way in which we can recycle them and recover and the way in which the new batteries now are being made, you can almost get five new from one old. And so why would you landfill that material when also it's volatile over a period of time? So, you know, for those that are having those sorts of comments, there's either a political or an industrial comment to be made. Just have a look at the facts.

around why it's best not to go into a landfill. And we work closely with government agencies and input regularly into government white papers and panels to actually help with consumer responsibility because if you look at the consumer responsibility over the last three years or so, it's plateaued.

And so those that will make the effort to take their batteries to the correct recycling point or collection point has actually plateaued now. So we know that government, for example, about 18 months ago did a limited program to put to pay for an additional bin as a pilot in certain post codes and make it easy for consumers by

giving them, if you like, a fourth bin to waste into. And it will come as no surprise that the consumer responsibility was hockey stick curve improvement. So we know that if we can make it easier for people that we can actually recover this. We as a company call this urban mining. And we think that there's a big part to play by the consumer.

and that our job as commerce is to make it cost effective to be able to do these collections and to safely transport this material through our communities to the places like our facilities at Wolverhampton where we can then end of life and recycle safely do all of those processes. So we've worked hard along with many many others of course looking at how we do the packaging, how we do the logistics.

And even in our case, we're looking at shrinking our industrial scale plant to make it into a mobile 40 foot container. So where we've got problematic material or fire damaged material, we can actually, the theory being is that once it's finished, we can take this module to where the problem is so that we don't then have to carry this material on the highways and through the communities effectively.

There's so much good work going on and it's real, it's real time. This isn't an enthusiastic, future tense conversation. These things are all happening and have been happening successfully for quite some time.

Gary Comerford (: 11:08

Let me pick up on that because recycling batteries, it has had a bit of a reputation of, yeah, it's coming in a few years. It's going to be really, really good. And that's kind of been there for quite a while. given what you've just said in answer to last question, what is the actual state of battery recycling in the UK? Do we know what percentage of,

quote unquote dead batteries are actually being recycled. How many different organizations are there in this particular sphere? Do we know?

Robin (: 11:36

The short answer is no, we don't. And there's a lot of good work going on to try and identify where the material and its quantum is. One of the slight issues that's clouding the statistics on this is that a number of organizations and companies that use lithium-ion batteries

have actually taken old material off and have put it into store. And so we know that there are warehouses full and even as a company, you know, we occasionally get surprised by how much material we find that's been stored over a period of up to 10 years in some cases. So those stats are still being flushed out. The actual robustness of the industry,

We are pretty unique in what we do because, and described as world leading, because we actually shred our batteries under liquid nitrogen. And the relevance of this is that our competitors in America who have had two to three billion dollars of government money now, they're shredding under water, under salt water. So if you've got a lithium ion battery, if you damage it,

it will go bang, flash and the energy will be released in the form of an explosion and fire. And we've all seen these pictures in one form or another on the news or social media. However, if you shred underwater as they're doing in America and others around the world, you actually wash away the liquid in the battery called the electrolyte and you also wash away the lithium. So the recovery rates are well below 90%.

before you even start the process. There's then high energy usage needed to dry the material. So that's our competitors. But what we're actually doing here in the UK is we shred under liquid nitrogen and we've got a novel shredding process that guarantees the destruction and controls any form of bang or flash inside the machine by replacing any oxygen immediately with liquid nitrogen.

And that enables us then to immediately take the liquid out of the electrolyte out of the battery, which makes the process a lot safer, but also a lot drier. So we need an awful lot less energy. Our whole site runs on less than 250 kVA of electricity, for example. And it makes it so much greener. And our recovery rates are in the high 99%.

where we, you you'll never capture everything. There's always going to be a tiny, tiny, tiny amount that's airborne, but as best you can, everything we've got going in the front end, we collect out of the backend and zero to landfill. So, so that that's given us an, whole ESG narrative with everybody from, you know, the automotive space, the Ministry of Defense, to Ocado, Halfords, High Street names that you would

recognize.

And what we have with that is as the industry is moving, because you'll know this space is so fast moving, and the race for chemistry is not yet settled. So one of the beauties we have is agility. Because if suddenly, you know, as we have with automotive, you know, we've, we've done all the initial trials on solid state batteries, for example, successfully done those. And also the

the fact that the battery stacks are getting wider. They're getting the full width of cars now. So when we first started looking at this, we only needed an aperture on the machine, a mouth on the machine of a meter wide to accommodate batteries and so on. Now to be able to put a full stack in, we're now developing and about to start manufacturing a new mouth. Well, we can have that done in three months. Whereas if you have to buy it through a third party from around the world,

and it's bespoke, we all know the pain and the cost that that creates. So we've got business agility with what we're doing as well. yeah, I think that's a very long answer to a short question, sorry.

Gary Comerford (: 15:37

Let's just pick up on a couple of the things that you've mentioned already. In terms of the actual batteries that been recycled, I think early on you said that you'll pick anything from the ones that you'll find in vapes and any sort of electronic item right up to electric vehicle batteries. Do you have a breakdown of what percentage of the batteries you're recycling are actually coming from electric

vehicles versus other sources for those batteries.

Robin (: 16:08

Yes we do and it's a very good question and we do a monthly and yearly comparison. And this time last year for example our top three clients were from the WE category, W-E-E-E, Waste Electrical category effectively. So this would be your laptops, your mobiles, your toothbrushes, your vapes, children's toy cars, e-bikes and so on.

But in the last 12 months, it's been overtaken by automotive. And we also are unique in that we can take damaged, defective and burnt batteries and process them and get full recovery from them of what's left, full recovery of whatever we've been handed. And so what we are now seeing is that automotive is our, by the end of this year will become our biggest

operator currently running in second place behind the Wii collection systems. But if you think about how small a vape battery is, for example, and then some of the from automotive are three quarters of a tonne. So you have to have an awful lot of vapes to match.

getting full batteries in from automotive. And we've also done a lot of work on next gen as well. some of the next gen that we've processed, we've trialed with the manufacturers. They're coming at us with a thousand volts in them. So these are serious, serious batteries that are going to propel four by fours in the same way as large petrol or diesel turbo.

Gary Comerford (: 17:22

you

Robin (: 17:46

fossil fuel vehicles will be propelled. you know, they're very, very next gen, gen four, gen five batteries are incredibly powerful. And the technology to rapidly recharge them now makes them comparable, in my opinion, with fossil fuels. But somebody somewhere has got to handle them if they go wrong. And that is our role is to make sure that those materials are

properly dealt with, end of life, don't end up in a grey market where much harm can be done. And we certify for our clients, we certify, every battery is certified that it's been end of life as well.

Gary Comerford (: 18:22

In terms of the chemistry of the batteries, if we look at electric vehicles, the two main ones are the NMC and the LFP. Are you able to deal with both of those or are you focused just on one in preference to the other?

Robin (: 18:36

Yes, we do both. And we've recently submitted papers for consideration to government. We have opted to batch process those two chemistries. So LFP is dealt with differently to the NMC family.

And I say NMC family because it may be a surprise, but vape batteries are NMC as well. So despite being a relatively cheap product, they've actually got the highest grade batteries in them. So we can process those along with automotive and not get any corrupted backend material. LFP is very much a commercial concern. I mean, it's easy to process.

and we do several thousands of tons of material. But the slight issue we have is that when it comes to what is the offtake from those, there is virtually no value at all of the back end of LFP. So if we don't charge a gate fee for the LFP, we will then have to stop processing. So we've written to government to, and it's been well received,

to say look, you know, we need to have a

responsibility scheme that brings in a levy for LFP chemistry batteries. This will help to protect recycling because without it, you know, you don't have to be a business person to realize that if you don't get a gate fee at the front end, no revenue at the front end, and there's no real benefit and revenue at the back end.

you've still got operating costs in the middle, you will not be viable and without government support, the whole system of recycling LFP will be finished. Then you're into exporting it back to China where they will government subsidize and recycle and retain international economic and commercial benefit from it or your landfill, which is just completely unacceptable.

So yes, there are challenges, thankfully being an island as we are here in the UK and not wishing to reopen debates on Brexit, but one of the upsides, and there are many debates on either side, I accept that, but one of the upsides is that we're able to look at European policy in the areas that we have here and either accept them and mirror them.

Gary Comerford (: 20:30

Mm.

Robin (: 20:54

or we can mirror them and add or mirror them and subtract from them around how we deal with these materials and how we keep them on shore here and dissuade people from actually exporting these minerals that we're not mining. And that's a critical pathway here. The UK has virtually no mining of lithium at all in any quantity and certainly not enough to support.

up to six gigafactories, which would be the ideal in the next 10 years. And so we have to either buy the material in or, as academia have reported, depending on the number of gigafactories, recycling in the way in which we're doing it, at Recyclus we may be able to supply up to the requirements of the gigafactories going forward by using recycled material.

and urban mining. So that's really where we're at.

Gary Comerford (: 21:47

So let's talk a little bit about your, I'm gonna use the phrase, supply chain. Now we've already talked about the WEE batteries that you're getting and we've talked about the electric vehicles. Now I wanna focus a little bit on the electric vehicle batteries that are coming in. Where are they coming from? Are these mostly...

EVs that have been in accidents or something like that. What's the actual source? Where are they coming from?

Robin (: 22:14

This is three key sources really. One is accident vehicles, as you rightly say. The second are warranty issues for automotive companies from around the world. And the third is material that goes to test centers and what would be classed as production scrap, effectively.

Gary Comerford (: 22:33

and

Is there contention between companies such as yourselves and companies that want to, for example, repair a damaged battery? Because obviously there are batteries which, because of the way the technology works, there are a lot of people who will see a damaged battery and go, right, that needs to be replaced. They'll ship that out and you'll get that. Versus there are companies that will come in and say, well, actually we've got 20 or 30 packs in here. There's only one of them that's actually wrong. We can take that out and replace it and keep that battery there.

How are you dealing with that contention?

Robin (: 23:05

We're strong of opinion on this and listening to others report to government like insurance for example, like academia and we believe that the recycling of these batteries is the preferred route and the recovery of the minerals and reuse of the minerals. So we're very firm in that.

We know that right now there is a strong market for this second use. The issue we have, and we're seeing, we carry 100 tons of material as feed stock ready to feed to the plant effectively. So we're seeing and dealing with these lithium batteries en masse every day from automotive.

We also for automotive do discharge and dismantle. So we get to see the insides of most automotive batteries as well. Our opinion is that the gray market is a dangerous place. And let's separate this into two tracks here. If you've got the gray market where you've got untrained folks that are buying from an internet system,

that's saying, and then doing a repair to a vehicle that they're not 100 % familiar with. There's, we believe there's already been experiences of loss of life to those when the cars have gone home and been charging. If you take the other track where you've got an automotive company that has got producer responsibilities that are saying,

actually we've got all of the correct test equipment and actually we've designed the battery in the first instance to be repairable because right now they're not. and we the car company or battery manufacturer, Gigafactory will actually continue to warrant as if it's to new performance effectively once we've done the repair.

then I think that's a very different argument because if it's to manufacturers original specification, then I don't think anybody can have a problem with that. But it's not for the faint-hearted to be a producer and have producer responsibilities because there are levies, there are liabilities that all have to be considered. So the slight worry is that we've got non-

Gigafactory or car company, you like, second life going into things like energy storage, of which some of them can be going into domestic use, for example. And they're the things that make us extremely nervous. you know, if we start to put these energy storage systems under tower blocks, for example, you know, then we all know where the potential hazard there could lead. So

Until you've experienced one of these batteries going pop and the energy and the force in which it happens, you you won't fully really understand the risk of getting it wrong with second life. So there is a big market at the moment. It's profitable here in the UK, but it's only profitable because the batteries are being shipped abroad. And so we're shipping, in our opinion,

batteries that could be vulnerable on the high seas in the first instance and then secondly to countries where let's say the standards may not be as rigorous as they are here in the UK. So we're very firm of opinion on that but driven by experience of what we see happen to the batteries that we deal with.

Gary Comerford (: 26:41

Right, so let me see if can clarify things because the general consensus, and I think I agree with it, is that the incidence of an electric vehicle battery igniting and causing thermal runaway is very, I it's not zero, but it's very, very small. And it's much smaller than the incidence of internal combustion engines going on fire.

But what you're saying is that once those batteries have reached a point where they've been taken out of that vehicle and then passed on to a third party who may or may not know in detail the minutiae about how to process that battery and make it into a second life, there is the possibility that the risk of thermal runaway will increase with the second life battery. Is that what I'm hearing you say or have I misunderstood you?

Robin (: 27:31

No, you've understood it slightly wider than that as well, but you've understood correctly. My point is this, if the manufacturer of the cell has tested it and deemed it to be within specification of that of a new cell, then there should be no additional risk. Where you've got people on the outside who have not tested to original specification.

the risk in my opinion is too great and shouldn't be allowed. And the reason is this, that we see in our everyday world that batteries that can be, you know, can put handheld devices on them to test the, you know, the energy storage and so on and so forth. But in reality, what you've got is a whole bunch of chemistry that's traveling from your negative to your positive or your positive to your negative, depending on whether you're charging or discharging. Okay. And there are certain

channels for these materials, let's say and The batteries themselves have got all of the raw ingredients to explode. So they also contain oxygen. Okay, and This thermal runaway it only needs to have one piece of if let me call it a membrane separation membrane that enables any of the chemistries to mix that should not mix and There is the perfect fire triangle

with calorific liquid called electrolyte. So what you've actually got is fire and high energy for explosion. So you end up with extreme temperatures and molten aluminium, whatever it is, copper aluminium and so on, that's actually flying through the air along with flames and it spits and it spits badly. So propagation is highly likely at that point. So that's really the whole

emphasis that we've got here is you just don't know. You can look at a battery, and we've had automotive batteries come into sight, been properly checked through, and we put them on the conveyor belt, and they then will go to thermal runaway on the 22 seconds that it takes for them to go on the conveyor belt into the liquid nitrogen, which is the safest point is in the liquid nitrogen. And we've actually had over the last 12 months

You know, we've had three new belts on our infeed because batteries have actually gone pop at that point. And they looked and tested to make sure that they were discharged effectively, looked perfectly fine and adequate to go into the system. And they still exploded on the conveyor belt. And when you see that and live that, and we spend 24 hours a day making sure the whole yard is controlled in that way, it then makes you worry for

you know, people putting them into places where they shouldn't really be if they haven't been properly validated.

Gary Comerford (: 30:21

Yeah, no, that makes sense. We're coming towards the end of our time. So what I want to do is just ask a couple of quick questions of recyclers themselves. I mean, we've talked about what you do, but I don't think that you've defined specifically what is your end product? Do you create new batteries or do you sell black mass or do you split out the different elements and sell them separately? What do you sell out and who is your market? Who do you sell to?

Robin (: 30:46

Okay, so a very good question. So anything that's non-ferrous, for example, and the liquid called the electrolyte. So we've got copper, we've got aluminium, we've got plastics, we've got high calorific liquids. All of those elements stay here in the UK. At the moment, we have a, you may have heard of an international company called Glencore, who are probably the biggest mining and commodities company in the world.

They take our black mass product and they then ship it to certain places around the world to make it back into pure enough materials to go into batteries. Now what is black mass? Black mass essentially, if you look at it, it looks like a talcum powder that contains the nickel, the cobalt, the manganese and the lithium. So has those four salts in it and

At the moment, the UK does not have industrial scale capability to separate this. And this is why we use Glencore, who may then it goes initially to Germany for a certain process, and then it can either then go off to India or to South Korea before it then goes back to China. So that's the circle, but all roads lead to and from China effectively. So that is what we are as a company working hard to break.

So we announced back in October, I think it was, that we're working with Jaguar Land Rover, Warwick University and a New Zealand mining company called Mint Innovation. We've won an 8.1 million government bid to set up and bring that black mass separation here to the UK. Now that process uses an alkali process.

So it's one way of getting the separation of the four salts. And the critical pathway, of course, is to make sure that you recover all four salts. Because for years, people have been able to get one or two, but we're now able to get four through this process. However, with the work that we've been doing over last two and a half years through government on the Government to Government India program, we've been working with a company there that's been processing and separating the black mouse

for the last 12 months using an asset process. So we're looking at ways to how we can work with that company. And I had the pleasure of going, whilst we're politically agnostic, I got invited to go with the Prime Minister back in November to go as part of the delegation to sign the trade agreement with India and where we can start to further trust each other with IP effect.

So they've got something there using acid. So at this point, we've got a twin track strategy with acid and alkaline. And we are looking at a third track, which may use a closed water system. Without using water and wasting water, it uses water in a process, but recycles it. And the reason that we're running all three of those tracks is very simple.

We know that the science is there to do the separation because we've already got that through Glencore. What we now need is what is the most cost effective way to do the industrialization piece to bring this black mass separation to the UK. So to be clear, we're dealing with minerals and our whole raison d'etre is to recover them, separate them, reuse them, but we will then be a supplier of material to gigahertz.

So we have no intention of starting battery manufacturing. That is a whole new world of expertise that we don't currently have in our business and wouldn't want to chase. It's into the billions of investment over a long period.

Gary Comerford (: 34:27

Now I once heard that in future, in time, we will have enough batteries being recycled into new batteries that we'll be able to cut down on the amount of mining that we do for raw minerals. I don't know what that percentage is, whether it's 50 % lower, 75 % lower, 90 % lower, I don't know. Do you think that's accurate? And if you do, what sort of timeline do you think we're talking about for that?

Robin (: 34:52

Yes, a question. it depends. Sorry, let me let me give you a direct answer. The direct answer is we will never be able to recycle enough to supply the gigafactories. OK, so virgin material will still be required. So we will be as a nation, we will be a buyer of raw material. However, depending on the number of gigafactories will depend on the percentage will depend on

the way in which we do it by: 2035

And even if it was 25%, it's still significant because of the carbon footprint reduction. And that's a critical pathway for automotive, as you know, is that they've got hockey stick targets to take carbon footprint out of production. So if you think that a car battery roughly weighs half of the car, you know, if we can help reduce the carbon footprint of that battery, then we've helped the automotive space.

get down to their carbon targets for each vehicle that goes along the production line. So we are an important part. There will be a gigafactory strategies document coming out around the 22nd onward of this month that I can't talk about. But you'll see that there's a lot of really good information in that policy paper.

of which we've had the pleasure of having our input into and in fact our company is named.

Gary Comerford (: 36:35

Good. Now this podcast will come out after that deadline that you just said. I will have read the document by then and I'll see whether I can put anything in into the podcast about it. Is there anything else that you'd like to say to the listeners about Recyclus and about the work that you're doing before we close?

Robin (: 36:54

No, think we've covered it all. Gary, to be honest, thank you.

Gary Comerford (: 36:56

Wonderful. Robin Brundle, appreciate your time. think it's been a fascinating conversation. I think a lot of it will have made a sense to a lot of people. Absolutely. I think it's been a great conversation and I appreciate it. Thanks for your time.

Robin (: 36:58

and hopefully some of it made sense.

My pleasure. Nice to meet you and thanks for yours.

Gary Comerford (: 37:11

So a couple of takeaways from this discussion. Battery recycling is far more widespread than people originally think it is. It's bolstered of course by the massive amount of batteries that are coming from things such as laptops and vapes and electric toothbrushes. But as Robin mentioned, it doesn't take too many of these large EV batteries to outweigh the much smaller batteries that they're also recycling. I was interested to hear his comments about LFP not being financially viable for recycling without a producer levy.

i.e. people who make the battery paying for the recycling upfront. But as Battery Electric Chemist Dr Ewan McTurk told us on a recent episode, LFP batteries are basically lithium fertiliser and rust, so it makes sense that the recycling value is much lower than something like nickel manganese cobalt Finally, if anyone was wondering, and I did ask, Robin Brundle is former F1 driver and current commentator Martin Brundle's brother. How about that? So what do you think? Was it worth the wait for this discussion?

I found the discussion to be quite fascinating, learned quite a lot. Who knew that second life batteries from EVs are potentially more dangerous than new ones under the right slash wrong circumstances? Well, any thoughts or comments? Drop a comment on the YouTube video or email me at the address below.

I hope you enjoyed listening to today's show. It was put together this week with the help of Robin Brundle from Recyclers Group.

Gary Comerford (: 38:55

If you have any thoughts, comments, criticisms or other general messages to pass on to me, I can be reached at info at evmusings.com and on the socials I'm on bluesky at evmusings.bsky.social. I'm also on Instagram at EV Musings where I post short videos and podcast extracts regularly. So why not follow me there?

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Check out the links in the show notes for more information as well as the links in my regular evening musings newsletter and associated articles. Now I know you're probably driving or walking or jogging or in the shower or washing the car but if you can remember and you enjoyed this episode drop a review in iTunes please, it really helps me out. I did go out and go in and have a look recently at some of the most recent reviews. Thank you very much for those who took time to do that for me.

Gary Comerford (: 40:25

If you've reached this part of the podcast and are still listening, thank you. Why not let me know you've got to this point by messaging me at evmusings.bsky.social with the words, minerals circularity, hashtag if you know, know, nothing else. And thanks as always to my co-founder, Simon. You know, I often wondered if he'd considering trying to do one of those really long distance journeys on his electric unicycle, like Edinburgh to Athens or London to Cairo. But I imagine there's so many logistical issues such as

Where he'd keep his cheese sandwiches if he has to carry everything in a backpack or would he need a complete support team or even would he actually have to stop to pee or just slow down or had I misunderstood things?

Robin (: 41:08

No, you've understood it slightly wider than that as well, but you've understood

Gary Comerford (: 41:15

Thanks for listening. Bye.