How to redesign clean energy tech for recycling

That could change, experts say, if the companies manufacturing supersized batteries for EVs and rare earth magnets for wind turbines shifted toward new adhesives that can be “de-bonded” using light, heat, magnetic fields, and more, or toward glue-free designs. While the heavy use of adhesives helps ensure the batteries don’t fall apart on the road, it can make them incredibly difficult to take apart in order to repurpose individual cells or recycle critical metals like lithium, cobalt, and nickel.“At the moment, because everything is bonded together, lots of batteries end up getting shredded,” study co-author Gavin Harper, an EV battery recycling expert at the University of Birmingham in the UK, tells The Verge. A single wind turbine can contain hundreds of pounds of rare earth elements, and demand for these metals is set to skyrocket as the world builds more EVs and more turbines.Abbott says manufacturers are just starting to wake up to the fact that recovering the critical materials inside clean energy technologies is important for shoring up long-term supplies — and that new design approaches are needed to facilitate that.