The cost of manual battery disassembly is not especially hard to calculate. After accounting for headcount, hourly rates and shift patterns, most recyclers arrive at a number relatively quickly. The problem is that the number is incomplete. Not because the labour cost itself is miscalculated, but because labour is often the only cost that appears on the invoice.

In reality, the full cost of manual disassembly is distributed across several areas that tend not to be quantified.

Throughput

A skilled operator takes around 55 minutes to process a single BEV pack*. That rate is not a starting point, it is the ceiling, regardless of demand or available workforce. At the volumes European recyclers are now facing, scaling a manual operation requires a proportional increase in headcount and floor space. The economics do not improve with volume.

Battery mix

The EV fleet arriving at recyclers today spans BEV and PHEV packs from more than 20 OEMs across a wide range of architectures, a number R3 Robotics has mapped directly through its Battery Intake Process library. Every new model is effectively a retraining event. An operator unfamiliar with a specific pack is more likely to cause cell damage and therefore produce inconsistent output.

Yield

Downstream value depends on the condition of what comes out of the disassembly process. Operator fatigue and time pressure introduce variance at every step. This variance leads to inconsistent handling thereby reducing recoverable component value.

Scale

More packs means more people. The marginal cost of processing an additional pack does not decrease as volume grows, which is not a sustainable model at two- or three-times current return volumes.

Knowledge

When an experienced operator leaves, everything they have learned about the packs they have handled, the undocumented quirks of specific models, the workarounds developed over time, leaves with them.

Labour is the tip of the iceberg. The costs beneath the surface: throughput limits, battery mix retraining, yield loss, lack of scalability and undocumented knowledge are the ones that prevent recycling operations from growing beyond their current volumes. Building a system that removes those constraints is what R3 Robotics was set up to do. If you want to understand how automated disassembly could help your operation, get in touch.

*based on R3’s benchmarking