Porsche is recycling electric car batteries to see if it can use them again in new EVs

Porsche is busy recycling electric car batteries as part of a big project to see if they can be used again... in electric cars.

It's a trial split into three parts. Initially, development cars' batteries get shredded into ‘black mass’, a delicious combo of plastic granules mixed with nickel, cobalt, manganese and lithium. Porsche says it's produced 65 tonnes of the stuff so far.

In the second stage, those valuable elements are sifted out of the black mass and refined again based on quality. Lastly, Porsche takes a reasonable dollop of the recycled materials to test and see how well they fare when put into real cars. Currently they're sent off for use in things like home storage modules, since the charging and discharging rates are far lower and slower (and thusly, cooler).

It all sounds pretty straightforward but it's always been much tougher (and more expensive) to prise the various elements contained in EV batteries apart, and Porsche has yet to see if the third stage will bear fruit.

Porsche hopes a 'circular economy' where the materials recovered from high-voltage batteries are of good enough quality to be used again in cars will help cut down on the amount of raw material it’ll need to source from – as Barbara Frenkel, Porsche board member puts it – "volatile and geopolitically unstable markets" for its cars. Plus, there are those Rules of Origin regulations all carmakers have to contend with.

Nonetheless, every carmaker with a circular economy agenda – which is pretty much every carmaker – knows recycling electric car batteries is an essential element of making those particular cars better for the planet than ICE vehicles. More as we get it.