Broken bottles may be good for roads and the environment

Dutch coalition PlasticRoad bike pathCars could soon provide a solution to one of the world's biggest environmental problems, not just contribute to them. Cars, or at least the roads they drive on, could provide a much needed outlet for tons of recycled plastics that currently have no place else to go. According to the EPA, the U.S. produces about 14 million tons of plastic waste a...

Nissan begins offering rebuilt Leaf battery packs

2012 Nissan Leaf SL electric car, owned by Shiva of Fremont, California, Oct 2017Starting this month, Nissan has begun offering rebuilt battery packs for the older Leafs, filling a gap for drivers of older cars whose packs have begun to run down. The company built a new facility in Japan to rebuild the packs, and will sell them for about $2,850 (based on the price in Japan), according to Inside EVs. Electric car repair trainer...

Nissan Leaf refurbished batteries offered for older electric cars, in Japan

2013 Nissan Leaf, Nashville area test drive, April 2013With more than 300,000 Nissan Leaf electric cars on the road, some more than six years old, battery degradation is becoming more and more of an issue. The different rates of capacity loss are a topic of much discussion among Leaf owners, but it now seems likely that Nissan's choice of passive air cooling rather than active liquid cooling has...

Nissan, Sumitomo open electric-car battery recycling plant in Japan

Nissan electric-car batteryThe town of Namie, in eastern Japan, was devastated by the earthquake and tsunami of 2011, and has struggled to recover from the devastation of that day. Almost seven years later, the first new plant in town is set to open, one contributing to clean energy and zero-emission vehicles to boot. Carmaker Nissan and an arm of the giant trading company...

Used electric-car batteries should be recycled, not reused: report

Battery pack assembly for 2015 Chevrolet Spark EV electric car at GM's Brownstown, Michigan, plantEven after they have degraded too much for continued automotive use, the lithium-ion battery packs in electric cars still have significant useful storage capacity. That's led several automakers to experiment with alternative uses for these "second-life" batteries in stationary energy storage. Battery packs can store energy generated by renewable...

Used electric-car batteries should be recycled, not reused: report

Battery pack assembly for 2015 Chevrolet Spark EV electric car at GM's Brownstown, Michigan, plantEven after they have degraded too much for continued automotive use, the lithium-ion battery packs in electric cars still have significant useful storage capacity. That's led several automakers to experiment with alternative uses for these "second-life" batteries in stationary energy storage. Battery packs can store energy generated by renewable...

Batteries from junkyard scrap metal and household chemicals?

Scrap metal (Photo by Daniel Bubois/Vanderbilt University)The increasing importance of batteries for electric cars, renewable energy, and consumer electronics has researchers looking for alternatives to the currently-dominant lithium-ion chemistry. But could one of those alternatives be a combination of junkyard scarp metal and household chemicals? That's what a group of researchers are proposing, in the...