Hello, and welcome to the Physics World weekly
podcast.
Home to nearly 10,000,000
people, the Chicago
Metropolitan
Area or Chicagoland
is one of the largest urban areas in
The US.
A scientific
powerhouse,
the region is home to two
US national labs,
Argonne and Fermilab,
as well as top notch academic institutions,
including the University of Chicago
and Northwestern
University.
Physics World's Margaret Harris was in Chicagoland recently
and met two scientists.
One who leads a national
collaborative center focused on the future of battery
recycling,
And the other who leads an institution
dedicated to molecular
engineering.
Those conversations
are coming up after this message about an
event that's sponsored by the Institute of Physics,
which also brings you Physics World.
On the May,
The Economist
is hosting
commercializing
Quantum Global twenty twenty five in London.
Participants will join global leaders from business,
science, and policy
for two days of real world insights into
quantum's future.
In London, you'll explore breakthroughs in quantum computing,
communications,
and sensing,
and discover how these technologies are shaping industries,
economies,
and global regulation.
You can register for the event at events.economist.com.
First up, Margaret speaks with the physicist
Nadia Mason.
She's dean of the Pritzker School of Molecular
Engineering
at the University of Chicago,
which focuses on quantum engineering,
materials for sustainability,
and immuno
engineering.
Here's that conversation.
So first question is, you know, molecular engineering
is kind of a a new concept.
How would you define this term, and how
does that sort of explain
all the things that we're going on here?
So molecular engineering is, it's new. It's it's
an exciting way, I think, of putting together
different fields that have the same goals.
So
the idea is that you're you're building things
from the from the molecular level up. And
it's something that you couldn't do years ago
because you didn't have the ability to manipulate
individual molecules in the same way or even
image individual molecules. You know, the revolution in
nanotechnology in the seventies and eighties and nineties
is really what led today to our ability
to even think about how do we
engineer and manipulate,
combine
things at this really basic molecular level
to to move toward applications that that utilize
them. You know, I'm I come from physics,
so I think about atoms.
You know? And
we still don't have the ability, really, I
mean, to to put together atoms in a
way that leads to functional devices. We can
do it with scanning tunneling microscopy, but we
really can't do it at the single atomic
level. Right? And before, we couldn't even do
that at the molecular level, but now we
can with different capabilities in in in chemical
engineering, in materials engineering, in physics. By combining
all of those things, we can now think
about, okay, how do we take a molecule
and functionalize it in just the right way
to lead to the next,
you know, therapeutic that helps cure cancer? How
do we take a
nano sized bit of of material, which you
can think of on the molecular scale, and
engineer defects to make the next generation of
quantum sensor?
How do we take
materials that form the backbone of our most
common plastics and
modify them on really the atom by atom
level to make them more recyclable?
These are things I I think we just
couldn't do, but now we know how. So
that those those form the basis of molecular
engineering. It's it's it's a way of of
thinking about
engineering the future
from a small scale
to the largest.
And so I think you you've got, I
hear the Pritzker School of Nucklesh Yes. Got
three different sort of fields, I think. So
we're talking mostly about energy and quantum today
Yeah. Yeah. The ones that are closest to
physics. But I guess there's also immunoengineering.
That's right.
What do you see as the connections between
these areas? How does that what's that kind
of cross pollination that you see between them?
Yeah. Great question. Well, I mean, at at
UChicago, we thought we wanted we didn't wanna
create a traditional school of engineering that had
departments that were just defined by whatever terms
were important in the early nineteen hundreds, like,
you know, mechanics. I mean, it's still important,
but it's not that doesn't that doesn't define
a problem. It defines an an area of,
you know, a very broad area of training.
So the idea is today, how do you
think about the problems we wanna solve and
train for those? And so that's how we
chose these three areas. There were things that
were both relevant right now that were that
we could build on existing strengths at Chicago
UChicago and in the community, but also that
we thought were going to be really important
for the future. So quantum engineering is is
now. It's happening. This is something that when
I started in grad school, it was just
quantum mechanics, and now we're we have companies
and we're designing devices. And, you know, engineering,
same thing. This is related to really the
fundamentals of how you manipulate molecules for for
biology and for therapeutics and applications in the
biological sphere.
And especially immunology is something that even in
the past ten years, it's become more fear
that the immune system affects almost every disease
that we that we have. I think something
like eighty percent of deaths are actually immune
system disorders
that, you know, that something breaks down and
then then affects the immune system, which is
what causes your organs to fail and you
to die. And then same thing with molecular
engineering, for energy and sustainability. That is, of
course, one of the biggest problems we have
out there. Now the great thing is because
we're thinking all about molecules manipulating,
having things interact across the board, across what
are really disparate fields,
what you'd think are disparate fields,
our faculty and researchers can use similar techniques
to work you know, to inform each other.
They can they can think about applications
that they might not have thought of otherwise.
You know, so one example is I was
just in the lab of one of of
two of our faculty who are in the
quantum group, but also in the immuno group,
because one of them, Peter Maurer, is using
quantum sensors.
So,
vacancy sensors and, you know, vacancies in in
materials, and now even proteins in biological systems
as quantum states to image biological systems. And
so the student who I was talking to
in his lab yesterday is a is a
biophysicist
who is actually, like, making,
you know, fluorophores. And, there is some green
thing that was like an algae somewhere. I
don't know. I don't even know what they
were doing with it, but it was funny
seeing it in a lab that had dilution
refrigerators and lasers and things like that because
they're they're not just, like, trapping and moving
things around. They're actually using proteins as quantum
sensors to, you know, to
image what's happening in individual cells to see
what, you know, ion channels and things are
doing for for that can affect specific biological
functions. And so, you know, another one of
our faculty, Sihang Huang, is looking at
bioadhesives. So he's confining material science and looking
at how to make adhesives, but functionalizing
them to work on organs with immunoreceptors
and things that make them
both compatible, but also can, you know, suppress
very specific reactions when you use these adhesives
in situ in your body. And he's one
of the first people to ever do this.
And, you know, again, they're working he's he
was working directly with other faculty who just
have who know the immunotherapies. And in the
Quantum Lab, they're working directly with, people who
work on therapeutics. So I think there's you
know, we always talk about how exciting science
happens at the interface, but here, you know,
we're all in the same building. And I've
personally never seen
so many
actual collaborations between people in what seems like
really disparate fields, but are just breaking boundaries
all the way. So super exciting, I think,
for us, but also
for our collective future.
How does your own research fit into that?
You know, you've been talking about other people's
research. Yeah. How do you see your your
own research? Yeah. Tell us about that. Yeah.
So I'm a I'm I'm trained as a
quantum physicist.
All of my all of my degrees are
in physics, and I focus on correlated electronic
systems. So systems where the electrons interact strongly
or nanoscale systems where you get new behaviors
because things are are so
small. I'm really more on the on the
quantum material side, which is looking at
at
how do you you know, what what new
functionalities can you get out of materials when
you think about them in the in the
quantum regime.
These are, you know, this is directly relevant
to a lot of our quantum engineering that's
going on where we're thinking about, you know,
what are what are the next generation of
quantum sensors? What are the what are the
next you know, how do we connect classical
computers
to quantum computers? How do we make quantum
computer computers more
more viable by increasing their coherence on the
long on long time scales?
You know, I think I I do the
my group does the does the legwork to
think of the next generation of of materials
and applications and phenomena that can feed into
all of this sort of quantum engineering. Now
you ask how it bridges. It bridges because
I think of materials as backbone of everything.
Right? If you you if you have if
you have a new material,
then you can find all sorts of uses
and applications for it. So you can think
of these new, we work on graphene, which
is a purely two dimensional material. That's something
that people in quantum care about because it's
an electronic material, but also in, you know,
our immuno engineers are using this as as
scaffolding, as a flexible scaffolding for different types
of of, of functionalized membranes, for example. So,
you know, the material backbone is another thing
that crosses all of all of these things.
And you talk about, you know, some trends
and developments in the field to know. What
is what is coming up that you're most
excited about
five years in the future, three years in
the future? Yeah.
I I touched on this a little already,
but I really think it is the intersection
of these different fields. I think that that
the intersection of biology and quantum is something
that that our our faculty have been exploring
extremely successfully that I think is is viable,
that we will have a quantum sensor that
can look inside a cell and will have
direct applications for
for therapeutics,
in a way that we just couldn't see
thing at a in a scale we couldn't
see things before.
I think that's, you know, that's five years
down the line. I think that'll be revolutionary.
As I mentioned, materials people who are also
combining materials and medicine in a in in
a way that comes from that from working
with deeply people who are deeply knowledgeable
about the medicine and working directly with them
to make things that not only, like, you
know, kind of work inside a body, but
make it better. Right? They can now heal
things but work.
You know, in the in the area of
of climate and energy, which is incredibly important
for the future,
you know, we
we will have new battery technologies, for example.
There's new, non lithium batteries coming online, sodium
batteries, for example, that'll be cheaper, that'll be
faster, that'll be more efficient. We're working directly
on those.
I think
I I'm excited to see
how we will continue
to address
our needs for
we we have a new institute for for
climate and and sustainable growth, and so I've
been thinking a lot about sustainable growth. And,
you know, so we we do have a
need for growth in our society, but, of
course, globally as well. Right? We we all
deserve higher living standards globally, not just in
this country, why we deserve to have healthy,
happy lives. That doesn't mean more money or
technology,
but to get there,
we will need to equalize the amount of
resources and technology that are available. We need
to do that in a sustainable way. And
to get there, we need to invent those
technologies to make them cheap enough, to make
them effective enough, to make them available enough
to help lift everyone in in the world,
not just The US, but everywhere. And so
it's a long winded way of saying, I'm
excited because I think we can get there.
I think that the next five to ten
years, because we have to, there'll be an
explosion in in developing those sort of technologies
across across the board. I really you know?
And okay. I'm I'm biased toward the three
areas that we focus on, but I think
that these are areas that are are going
to continue to explode in in the buy
in the biomedical space, in the energy space,
in the quantum space,
and in the climate space also.
Yeah. You talked about, you know, getting there
in the next five to ten years. What
are the big challenges? What are the barriers
you have to overcome to
to produce a quantum sense of the Yeah.
Incense in Yeah. In the human body to
develop sustainable materials. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know,
this brings us all the way back to
molecular engineering in the materials space. Sometimes we
just need to jump in materials. We need
to be need to understand materials better to
improve their properties. So in quantum, one of
the biggest limitations is that we we can't
maintain our quantum wave functions. It's the coherence
times. Those are often materials problems. We have
to know what's what is preventing what is
making the these quantum states unstable,
and and how do we engineer that away.
And we're making strides toward that, but I
think we have to do a better job
of that. And or how do we engineer
around it to mitigate those effects, like error
correction in quantum computing? We're making strides toward
that too. But some of that is incremental
strides that are necessary, and some of it
is actually jumps in knowledge. You know? It
it you can it's when I think about
fundamental jumps, they can be in fundamental science,
but you also need fundamental engineering jumps. They
think back to the transistor and why we
have microelectronics
today. It was the invention of the transistor
that was one big jump. But then the
invention of the integrated circuit, which is really
an engineering feat, was the next big jump
that allowed us to go from something that
was as big as our hand to something
that, you know, as, you know, supercomputer in
our pocket, basically. Right? Our our phones. Right?
All these things. So so we need some
of those, you know a lot of the
fundamental jumps have been made, but we need
some of those engineering jumps to be made.
And I think across the board in in
battery space too. You know, we know we
know where we want to go, but what
are the materials that allow us to do
that? How do we actually connect them? How
do we think in new ways? How do
we just kinda free our brains and have
those moments that, okay, we can we can
do this or even just play around and
discover suddenly that this works in a way
that was unexpected?
We we need more of those moments to
build the future. And I think that as
long as we keep supporting basic
engineering
and science, we'll get there. But we do
need to keep pushing in those directions.
So
you talk about the the need to improve
materials, the need to improve the the basic
functionality. But after that, of course, there's a
challenge of taking those things into commercialization and
eventually to market. How what are some of
the ideas that you have to overcome that
that gap? Yeah. I think there's there's there's
a broad understanding everywhere from the NSF up
to the highest, you know, levels of government
and in the labs that we can't
it's not good enough to just invent something
in the lab, especially in the school of
engineering. You really wanna get what you your
idea to have effect, have impact. And to
do that, you have to get in the
hands of people who will use it. And
to do that, you have to work with
companies. You have to either start your own
company that's gonna utilize these these devices and
these things that you make or work with
existing companies.
We really believe in that. We've been, supporting
faculty starting companies,
working working with companies, and working with industry
at every level, including having starting,
you know, networks that have industry come into
our labs and tell us what their greatest
needs are and us tell them what we're
working on and what's cutting edge and so
we can work together to bring things quickly
to market. It's also important to just to
understand that we face such big challenges
that no one lab, no one
school, no one university can do this alone.
And one of the things that has really
attracted me the most to being in Chicago
and at the University of Chicago is that
we've been able to participate in and really
help create ecosystems
that
build
industries and that build these connections between basic
research and
impact as efficiently as possible. So we work
with the national labs very, very closely. We
work with with companies. We work with the
government. We work with the other universities across
the state and across Midwest and and across
the world even to make sure that we
create ecosystems
that support
research,
products,
impact, and improve lives as efficiently as possible.
And we've done that in the quantum sphere
here in Chicago. I think we've we've really
helped make Chicago the the center of the
quantum world. This happened because of a big
support from the government, the governor from especially
the state government, governor Pritzker, has been incredibly
supportive of quantum. We've worked really closely with
our our state universities, University of Illinois, with
Northwestern University, and with the labs, and been
able to build something where quantum companies now
want to come here to work with researchers,
to build things, to test, to make sure
that we can just get this technology furthered
as as quickly as possible. And we wanna
do that in the energy sphere. We wanna
do that in the biosphere. We wanna make
sure that that we're
having impact as efficiently as possible. And we're
getting really good at that. So I'm I'm
incredibly excited to see what happens in the
next five years. So I think there'll there'll
be a lot a lot of positive change.
Elijah Mason, thank you very much. My pleasure.
That was Nadia Mason of the University of
Chicago
in conversation with Physics World's Margaret Harris.
Now, Margaret speaks with Jeffrey Spangenberger,
who leads the Materials
Recycling Group at Argonne National Laboratory.
They talk about the Resell Center,
a national
collaboration of industry,
academia,
and national laboratories
that Spangenberger
leads.
He explains how ReCell
is advancing
recycling
for current and future
battery technologies.
The first thing I wanted to ask, you
know, just as when you're talking about battery
recycling, what types of batteries are we talking
about? Are we talking about the batteries in
your phone, batteries in your car,
both, everything?
Yeah.
Specifically,
right now, we're focused on lithium ion batteries.
Not lithium metal batteries, lithium ion batteries.
But they can be in your car, in
your EV, your hybrid,
or they could be in your phone, your
cell phone.
They could also be in storage
applications, so the grid
or your your house backup, things like that.
So how do you recycle a battery? Like,
what goes into that process?
So
the actual process of of a battery is
done
more prominently in two different fashions. There's
hydrometallurgical
recycling, and there's pyrometallurgical
recycling.
In pyrometallurgical
recycling,
we use heat to essentially burn off with
the organics,
and then the metals are recovered
in,
in the furnace.
And there's two fractions. There's,
a metal alloy, which has a lot of
the great metals, and then the copper, the
precious metals,
which are not really in too much on
a battery except maybe on a on a
electric panel or something like that. But there
is also a slag, and then that slag
contains lithium metal,
unfortunately,
as well as aluminum. Those two are in
in batteries.
They can be recovered, but it's a little
bit more difficult than they would be normally.
So
that's one of the
the issues with pyro.
That's not to say that pyro isn't good.
There are a lot of good applications for
pyro.
And and there's not one hydro or pyro
is not gonna take over the world in
recycling. There are a lot of different
pros and cons of each.
In hydro metallurgic or recycling,
you usually
shred the battery to liberate the metals.
Metals are typically what you're going after as
a number one material.
You put it in acid.
You dissolve the the metals, and then you
can
separate those metals out
and and recover them and put them into
new new products that way.
So those are the two main ones. We
also work,
along with some other companies on direct recycling,
which is a third type of recycling.
There's also the other materials other than metals
that you wanna get from recycling, plastics.
There's,
fluorinated products, which we need to make sure
we keep our eye on.
That would be in the polymers that are
in the some of the polymers that are
in a a lithium ion battery.
The electrolyte salt has fluorine in it. So
these are all materials that,
you know, should be dealt with.
What else is in a battery?
The anode. So the anode is typically graphite.
It it is a larger portion of the
battery mass wise, and so we wanna we
wanna reuse those materials as much as possible.
In fact,
natural graphite is a critical material
that not many people think about. But and
and there's both synthetic and graphite and and
natural graphite in these batteries, so
it's important that we recycle those as well
and not just go after the money making
metals.
So how do you get to me it's
kind of easy conceptually to imagine, okay, in
some some way that with metal, you melt
it down and then you work out what
you know, there's various quite established processes for
us to separate it out. How do you
recycle something like
graphite, or how do you recycle some of
the fluorinated compounds that you need to recycle,
presumably because they they would otherwise get into
the environment to do bad things there. Right.
Yeah. So with graphite, there's
people working on it.
The way that you process a battery can
have
I don't still wanna say good things happen
to it, but maybe not bad things or
bad things happen to it. Like, if you
put graphite in in acid,
a lot of times that makes it more
difficult to reuse in new batteries. The the
best way is to take the material and
reuse it in a new battery.
Fix it, basically, rinse it off,
refurbish it, if you will.
It's not that easy, though.
There are processes that make that part easier,
but you can also use graphite for a
lot of different material sources. So and that's
good. And recycling, you know, it's really important,
I think, to to try and
close that loop. If it's in a car,
put it back in a car. But sometimes,
if you don't put it back into the
original application,
you still are relieving it from sourcing somewhere
else for another product. Right? So maybe it
doesn't go into a battery. Maybe it goes
into a reductant or something in our furnace.
With the
the fluorines,
I think
that's a real challenge
with with how we deal with that is
they're in low quantities in a battery.
And pyro, actually, what happens is they're well,
they go up into the,
exhaust, and they're captured and treated.
So,
so you collect them.
In hydro,
there's a lot of work that's going on
now, especially with PFAS being a
a big consideration.
There's work to remove it. There's work to
capture it when we're recycling it as well.
Why is it so important that we get
better at recycling batteries?
Yeah. Great question.
The the funny thing is on the other
side of the lab, he's probably gonna be
talking about all the great work that's going
into making the batteries
the new batteries
better.
And when you make a new battery better,
it usually means cutting cost and improving performance.
When you cut costs specifically,
it makes recycling
more difficult
because we need money on the back end
to fund those processes.
So if you take all the valuable metals
out there, you take out the cost of
the materials,
it makes recycling harder. So that's why we
need to be better at recycling.
And so it's important that we don't just
work at this,
find a solution,
and
call it good. We gotta continue to to
improve because it's gonna be more difficult as
we go down the road. Plus new chemistries,
we always need to to work on what's
what's coming down the road that we're gonna
be seeing in our recycling plants.
What about the sort of supply chain aspect?
I mean, some of them some of these,
materials, particularly the metals, high value metals, it's
not just that it's expensive to develop and
it's there's a finite amount of them out
there, and they may not necessarily be in
locations that are easy to get at. That's
right.
So, you know, The US
is
very
low in quantities of these materials that go
into the batteries. We get them from other
countries, and it puts us at a security
risk.
So
recycling is important from that perspective because we
want to get these materials,
buy them once from another country, get them
here and keep them here and recycle them
and keep them within our domestic boundaries.
Another reason to recycle is
because
in some predictions, if we don't change our
chemistries, we're gonna actually run out of the
materials, not have enough to meet our projections.
Cobalt, specifically, is really difficult. So we have
to recycle those materials to make sure that
we have them available
instead of just mining them, using them, and
throwing them off.
What are the main challenges facing a center
like this in trying to develop
better ways of recycled batteries?
I see. I think
there's two answers that I wanna I wanna
give to that. One is our objective is
to help industry.
We want industry to succeed.
And so there's a lot of good challenges
out there that are,
that we're excited to tackle.
And so we do work with industry.
We work together collaboratively with them to address
these challenges.
The other aspect of that is
and this gets back into the direct recycling.
We'll do
some more
far out research.
We'll look at some of the more challenging
stuff that industry maybe doesn't wanna spend the
money on.
And so we'll look at things like, originally,
direct recycling was a very
not well known. It was a not unknown,
but not well known method of recycling batteries.
That's you you have a battery and you
make another battery with it. A little bit
to be more specific on that, I guess,
I would say
direct recycling is to take it could be
any material, but we focus on the cathode
of the battery.
So we take the cathode,
and instead of putting in an acid and
dissolving the metal
into metal ions or putting it in a
furnace and melting it down into a a
reduced metal alloy,
we keep it as a cathode.
We fix it while it's still a cathode.
It's never changing its cathode structure,
and we're making new cathode out of it
so it can go into a new battery.
And the reason that's so important
is because
to make cathode, which is the most expensive
part of a battery,
it has two portions. There's the materials that
go into it, and then there's the processing,
the manufacturing cost of it.
When you dissolve in an acid or melt
it in a in a furnace,
you have to take those materials
and remanufacture that into a cathode, and that
can be a substantial amount of the money
to make cathode.
So if you don't do that, the value
is basically,
in in some cases,
half of the cost of a battery may
be from raw materials. Sometimes 10%
is just is the raw materials, and 90%
is the processing cost. And so
huge opportunity for cost gains,
improve economy and environmental,
impacts.
The the website mentions
that Resell is working to advance recycling technologies
for current and future battery chemistries. Mhmm. What
is Resell?
Good question.
So resell is is a federally funded program
that is a a collaboration of four national
laboratories,
Argonne National Laboratory,
Oak Ridge National Laboratory,
the National Renewable Energy Laboratory,
and Idaho National Laboratory.
We also have some universities that are doing
work with us. But they have these four
focus areas,
direct recycling,
advanced resource recovery,
design for sustainability, and modeling and analysis.
And all of these focus areas are used
in order to reach the ultimate goal of
lowering the cost of new batteries.
The whole thing has to come down to
or comes down to
decarbonizing
our planet.
And,
to do that, batteries do a great job
at it. And we wanna get more people
driving EVs and using them in the grid
and and all these applications. To do that,
we need to lower the cost, And recycling
is a huge opportunity to do that.
I'm really interested about this and future chemistries.
What are those chemistries, and how much is
recyclability
taken into account when people are developing new
battery types? Yeah.
Great question. You you do ask all the
good questions.
So
we spend some time looking at
new chemistries.
We don't spend too much time because
as you probably know,
some people may not. But, like, you'll see
in the news,
some group found the solution to the batteries,
and it's gonna last a million years and
all that stuff. But you see it all
over the place, and that may be at
milligram quantity,
scales
or,
you know, maybe not feasible at in large
quantity.
So we take advantage of in a vehicle,
a vehicle last fifteen years. So if it's
not in production,
we we know we don't need to worry
about it too much. But we wanna make
sure that we're looking at chemistries
that are starting to take shape that are
gonna end up on a vehicle or in
some application.
And we wanna make sure that it's not
going to cause a big problem
because you can contaminate a big stream if
you have a little bit of something in
it. So if they're using a little bit
of something in it, we wanna
recommend that they don't go with that chemistry.
So we have four focus areas in resell.
There is direct recycling.
There is, advanced resource recovery.
That's our second one. Advanced resource recovery is
the, recovery of materials that we can't directly
recycle.
Then there is modeling and analysis
and
design for sustainability.
And design for sustainability is what I wanna
mention.
We want to make our batteries, use materials,
use assembly methods
in a way we wanna make them better.
We wanna design better ways, better materials to
put into our batteries so that the recycling
can be handled more easily, more cost effectively.
And that's probably the most challenging focus area
that we have is
trying to change what's working today
so that it's easier to recycle tomorrow.
It's it's just when things aren't broken,
don't fix them kinda
just challenging. But those are the things that
we're doing, we're very aware of. And you
think about anything when you look around a
room, what's designed for recycling? What's designed for
sustainability?
There are some, like, our water bottles got
thinner plastics. Right? So that's good.
And I think that's always a consideration. But
what, you know, what big changes can we
make that are really gonna catapult us into
the next generation of design?
I think that's really cool.
Final question then. You know?
What's what's the dream here? Where's where's the
field headache? Give me your your sort of
vision for a future of battery cycle. How
how would it work in your sort of
ideal system?
Oh,
how much time do you have?
No. I think the real quick answer or
the quickest answer is
it's circular. We get to that circular
economy that that people like to say. So
we buy these materials once.
And in the beginning,
you know, I'm not naive to think that
these batteries are gonna power our vehicles or
store the energy that powers our vehicles
forever. Right? There's this s curve. So we're
just we're at the bottom of the s
curve. But as we get more materials available
for recycling, we can put them into the
recycling that we have. And, eventually, there's that
inflection point where we can put most of
that material into
recycling
into new products,
and we can actually
require very little material to make our batteries.
At some point, though, something's gonna replace lithium
ion batteries just like we're replacing the internal
combustion engine now.
And so
during the lifespan
or the majority of the lifespan of these
lithium ion batteries,
I think, you know, towards the end, we
wanna be able to have this complete circularity
or near complete circularity so that we don't
have this this security risk of relying on
other other countries. We have cost. You know,
if you have a a pile of dirt
and a pile of batteries,
you know, which one would you think would
be cheaper to get the raw materials to
make a battery from? Right? It's probably from
batteries.
Now we just happen to be processing dirt
for so long. We're good at it, and
we're at scale, and we're not. Recycling batteries
is very new. But, eventually, they're gonna equalize,
and, and they're gonna be a great resource
for those materials. So yeah.
Thank you very much.
That was Jeffrey Spangenberger
of Argonne National Laboratory
in conversation
with Physics World's Margaret Harris.
Before that, Margaret spoke with Nadia Mason of
the University of Chicago.
Thanks to all three of them for coming
on the podcast.
And a special thanks to our producer, Fred
Isles.
On the May,
The Economist is hosting
commercializing
quantum global
twenty twenty five in London.
Participants
will join global leaders from business,
science, and policy
for two days of real world insights into
quantum's future.
In London, you'll explore breakthroughs in quantum computing,
communications,
and sensing.
And you'll discover how these technologies
are shaping industries,
economies, and global regulation.
You can register for the event at events.economist.com.
I'm afraid that's all the time we have
for this week's podcast.
We'll be back again next week. See you
then.