E-Bikes & Bikes Customised to You
Hey, all you lithium-ion fanatics. This is Peter at sixthreezero e-bikes and bikes. Everyone has a lithium-ion battery in some way, either in their laptop or their cell phone or maybe in their e-bike or their Tesla. You've got a lithium-ion battery. You probably have several in a drawer somewhere in your kitchen or on your desk. What do you do with those?
All right. So if you have a lithium-ion battery, you probably have a few lying around maybe an old phone or in your computer. Again, the e-bike's here we're interested in. All lithium-ion batteries will eventually lose their ability to charge. So they'll degrade over time. It may take two years, three years, five years or so, or maybe even 10 years in a sophisticated system where the batteries are managed very well. However, the lithium-ion battery will lose its capacity and will no longer be useful. However, there are a lot of components inside the battery that can be reused again and are still useful. So anyway, you're supposed to recycle your lithium-ion battery. In no way should you ever throw these things away. There are a lot of reasons why. Environmental, but also in terms of just good stewardship of precious materials that are actually getting harder and harder to mine and that we need here in this country and around the world for the products that we use.
So what you should do is take it to a recycling center. They're very easy to find. A lot of places like Staples, Office Supply, Lowe's, and Home Depot. There's an electronic store called uBreakiFix. They will usually take it. Also, your local waste facility will usually take it. There's a really great website called Call2Recycle. It's Call, the number two, Recycle.com. I'll write that down in the comments. Call2Recycle.com. You can go there, just put in your zip code, and it'll show you the various places where you can drop off your battery. I really encourage you to do this. It's the right thing to do for the environment, in my opinion. But also things like the cobalt, the nickel, the copper, and the lithium, of course, are all very, very valuable materials. They're getting harder and harder to mine. And the mining itself is a very complex and also environmentally damaging process.
But we have all these wonderful materials already right here. So I do encourage you to recycle it. It's amazing because there are a lot of facilities around the United States, especially one started by a man named J.B. Straubel, who was the man behind the battery at Tesla. And so he started up his own company called Redwood Materials. You can look that up. It's pretty cool. And he brings in a lot of lithium-ion batteries, and then they recycle it. They take it apart. They pull out all those precious materials, the cobalt, the lithium, the copper, the graphite, et cetera. And then they can separate all those materials. They give it back to Panasonic or whoever is building more batteries. Just take it back to the raw materials. And at some point, it's believed that the biggest source of materials for new batteries for new cars and other devices will actually be in the stream already. Because it will get increasingly difficult to mine, as they have to dig farther or search farther afield to get these materials.
So I do encourage you to recycle it. It's easy to. Also, if you're worried about your data, these recycling centers will completely wipe the information on the computers or on the phones or whatever before they destroy it. So it's supposed to be that your information is safe and won't get into nefarious hands. So do recycle it. You can take it to one of the places that I just mentioned or you can go onto Call2Recycle's website. If you don't live close to any facility, they can actually mail you a kit where you can put the battery in, and then they'll take care of it. So please do that. Good for the environment but also good for the country for salvaging these very, very valuable and increasingly expensive materials to put back into the production stream and keep us going with our cell phones, laptops, and e-bikes.
I truly hope that that was helpful for you. If you liked it, please do like it and hit subscribe. It helps grow our channel. And if you need any help at all, please contact us. You can call us at 310-982-2877 or email us at theteam@sixthreezero.com. Remember sixthreezero is spelled out. S-I-X-T-H-R-E-E-Z-E-R-O. theteam@sixthreezero.com. Thanks.