Dickson Leow, General Manager at Infinitev, likens the Melbourne-based leader in EV battery recycling’s facility to a hospital.
“This battery hospital that we’re talking about,” is a unit of Innovative Mechatronics, or IM, which is owned by listed company automotive products group GUD Holdings, said Leow in a presentation at the IPWEA fleet conference in March.
In his lead up to discussing the processes Infinitev uses and why fleet people need to care, Leow shone a light on the circular economy.
“We envision a sustainable ecosystem, a circular ecosystem by utilising the reuse, repurpose and recycling protocol pathways, a true circular economy beneficial for all of us,” said Leow, “We need to change the mindset of the make-use-discard to make-use-reuse-repurpose, and then recycle.”
Leow noted that though Australia doesn’t yet have many end-of-life electric vehicle batteries for his facility to process, the technology is here.
To be sure, he said, the galloping increase of EV sales in Australia will in years to come ensure a supply of batteries that can be reused and repurposed as energy storage.
“Consider in 2017 we had 1100 vehicles or battery electric vehicles sold,” said Leow, adding, this compared with some 9000 sold in 2023. “And this is increasing day by day, month by month, year by year.”
Leow explained the process Infinitev uses to assess EV batteries, and determine if they can be reused in an electric vehicles, repurposed for storage systems, or recycled to recover valuable metals and minerals including cobalt, lithium, nickel and cadmium.
“We can assess the health of the battery, and then we can reprogram it and understand whether or not we can take that block out, or take that module out, and then replace the like for like to rebalance the whole pack.”
Talking to an audience of some 200 fleet executives, Leow advised everyone to learn the new lingo of batteries so they can understand among other things what their mechanics are talking about. Unfortunately, he said, many of the terms used — for example, block and cell, are not being used uniformly.
Leow said Infinitev was trying to set an industry standard for battery recycling in Australia. He said it could be like the ANCAP vehicle safety rating system.
“We want to create something very similar,” he said. “You know, there’s a lot of backyarders out there. They try and just swap the cells and then you have a incident. Definitely bad for the whole industry. So we’re trying to set the industry standard.”
