More than 1 million electric vehicles are now driving on US roads. What will happen when those cars go out of service? The plan is to recycle their batteries.

Without recycling, the batteries from those electric vehicles would become 8 million tons of global scrap by 2040.

And battery recycling needs to be cost effective.

Scientists have taken another step toward that goal at the US Department of Energy’s ReCell Center. That’s the US’s first advanced battery recycling research and development center, headquartered at Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, Illinois.

Argonne is offering a free 15-minute webinar on Tuesday, December 7, from 10-10:15 a.m. CT. (That’s 11-11:15 a.m. ET.)

The webinar is called “Science at Work: Clearing the path to recycling batteries at scale.”

You can sign up for the short webinar here, and it’s open to everyone.

In the webinar, materials scientists Jessica Durham and Albert Lipson will describe the breakthrough they achieved in which they learned how to recover, separate, and regenerate the cathode material, a battery’s positively charged electrode, at scale. Once complete, the processes will help pave the way for the large-scale recycling of electric vehicles.

They’ll discuss the challenges of recycling and the steps needed to overcome them.

Read more: There is no Li-ion battery recycling standard, but that may be about to change

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