Most solar powered mini grids and SHS include a lead battery to store solar energy for the night. But also Li-Ion batteries are becoming more and more popular and the amount of batteries requiring recycling is increasing. Environmental friendly and safe battery recycling facilities are usually not available which brings serious risks to health and environment.
We decided to get active to develop solutions to overcome this problem: On the one side, we are active in R&D projects and on the other side we are looking for partners to jointly work on recycling solutions as well as smoothening the political and regulatory framework.
Currently there are rarely financial budgets or concepts implemented for battery recycling of such systems. This leads to end of life batteries from SHS and mini grid projects being stored without recycling solution, even disposed by users anywhere or being recycled locally in a harmful and environmental unfriendly way. Ideally, in future every project needs to provide a recycling concept and new batteries can only be imported to African countries if end-of life batteries are recycled in the same volume. Maybe the concepts can also be adopted to other industries (e.g. vehicle batteries).