this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2023
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Question to anyone who might know more: would sodium based batteries be better than lithium ones for the environment, in terms of recycling or disposing of it?
In case they are indeed better, would they be better because it's better to use less lithium in general (so if you use more sodium based ones, you use less lithium) or would they be also better because their own disposal is "nicer" (as in less toxic) for the environment?
Well, Sodium is the 6th most abundant element on Earth, so there's a lot more of it and the extraction process is probably far more environmentally friendly.
Since Sodium batteries are so new I don't think we have data on the toxicity, disposal or recycling avenues yet.
They're actually old tech. They just could never match lithium.
They'll shine as standing storage more so than mobile applications. Home storage will benefit greatly from their improvements
That's very interesting. If they can be used at home or in cars that don't require batteries with a very large capacity, then that would be really good to counter the scarcity of lithium (and hopefully, help the environment too)
If they can get industrial scale it could also allow energy grids to capture excess power instead of wasting it. Could yield massive efficiency increases being able to reclaim some of that loss.
Interesting! So it would make sense to have tons of sodium batteries for all purposes for which one doesn't need maybe higher capacity or performance as I understand lithium batteries offer
Instead of thinking "capacity" by itself, thing of "capacity for the given space" or rather "density". So Sodium batteries can be equal capacity as Lithium, but the equivalent capacity Sodium battery will be significantly larger. In applications like storing overproduced wind or solar electricity for use later, we don't care how big the battery is. However, it a moving vehicle where every square centimeter and every kg changes the performance of the car, those density differences can have a real impact.
It was a light bulb moment to me when I realised toxicity is at least somewhat correlated with abundance.
Like lots of metals can be toxic but something like iron is so common you could just throw it on the ground and while certainly not ideal it's far from a major problem. The environment is very good at dealing with iron.
I don't find the source anymore, but i saw a lifetime analysis about sodium ion batteries. Overall they are slighly worse than lithium ion due to higher energy input required during fabrication, despite better mineral availability.
The most common Na-ion batteries use Prussian Blue.
I suppose maybe they're still useful innovations if they can be made with minerals which are more available.
Probably, we could achieve a balance between one type and the other, but I'm daydreaming now...
The main idea here is that we won’t run out of raw materials very easily when using stuff that’s relatively cheap and abundant. Well at least the ions are. Who knows what the anode and cathode are made of. Probably the usual materials; otherwise they would have mentioned it. If they still use cobalt in the cathode, you can’t really avoid the ethical questions that come with it.
Producing all the other materials can be rather energy intensive depending on the method used, so it depends. If you buy your metals from a country with hardly any environmental regulation, you can be pretty sure they don’t give a dingo’s kidney as to how many trees are chopped down and how many puppies are thrown in a furnace to get the next shipment of metals delivered.
Also, the electrolyte could be more or less harmful to humans and the environment. As far as the environmental impact is concerned, these batteries probably come with all the usual issues. Currently there just aren’t any perfect solutions commercially available. Regardless, this seems like a step in the right direction IMO.