I love the Prius with it's great gas mileage and low emissions but I'm curious...what happens to that humongous battery when we're done with it? How does the overall long term environmental impact of a hybrid including battery manufacture and disposal compare with the impact of your average econobox or next gen diesel? I confess complete ignorance here and I'm hoping some of you fine folks have this stuff right at your fingertips. 8)
toyota has requested that all the HV batterys go back to them for disposal. I would probably believe that they have some sort of agreement with Panasonic for disposal.
From what I heard elsewhere I believe on this forum, I believe there is even a "bounty" for the batteries for dealers - ie, they get $$ for each battery they send back to Toyota (or Panasonic) for recycling. -m.
The deposit for the battery is 200$ from Toyota and the whole thing is recyclable. These batteries are green, as far as any manufactured product can be.
Apparently Toyota already has a battery refurbishing/recycling plant set up. I read it in one of the writeups on Prius Environmental Design. It's just in mothballs right now because none of the batteries are failing.
Do you happen to have a link to the info about the refurbishing plant? I'm curious about the process -- do they have to dump the acid as part of the process?
There wasn't anything about the Process. Just an explanation that as part of the design of the Prius to be completely recyclable, that they had already built the refurbishing plant. I don't have the link handy. I think I have the PDF on one of the puters but not this one apparently. If I find it I'll upload it. But remember, the Prius batteries don't contain any Acid, quite the opposite
