It is all part of the effort to stick to The European Parliament's new law banning the sale of petrol and diesel cars from 2035 . Though many people consider electric cars as the future of environmentally friendly transport, the production of the batteries that power them is far from it.
The best way to produce lithium in this region is using evaporation pods. Using this technique requires a lot of water - around 21 million litres per day. Approximately 2.2 million litres of water is needed to produce one ton of lithium. From their laboratory in Trappes, northern Paris, Eramet has been working on a process to recycle batteries.
"Unlike the fuel burned by heat engines, these metals are 95% recyclable", assures Frédéric Martin, director of the battery recycling project at Eramet ideas. This dark mixture is made up of nickel, cobalt, manganese and lithium - all the metals needed to store and conduct electricity inside a battery. The next challenge is to separate them. An overview of the challenges and opportunities of the climate crisis, as it changes the world we know.
At the end of the process, the lab produces jars of battery-quality materials: green granules of nickel sulphate, copper red granules of cobalt sulphate and a white powder of lithium carbonate. All are ready to be sold and remade into batteries. Until now, no factory treated the black mass in Europe and it had to be exported abroad.