Impact of the European Union vehicle waste directive on end-of-life options for polymer electrolyte fuel cells

Polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs) may well be powering millions of cars by 2020. At its end-of-life, each car will have a redundant PEMFC stack. The EU vehicle waste directive sets tough recycling and re-use requirements for the cars of the future. The criteria for assessing the end-of-life options are based on technical, economic and environmental feasibility. The optimum strategy will require stack dismantling and separation of the major components. Steel and aluminium parts can enter the general recycling stream, but the membrane electrode assembly and bipolar plates will require a specialised recycling process. One option is to shred the MEA, dissolve and recover the membrane, burn off the carbon, and recycle the platinum and ruthenium catalysts using solvent extraction. The heaviest part of the PEMFC stack is the bipolar plates. If carbon fibre based, the bipolar plates could enter a fluidised bed recovery process where the constituent materials are recovered for re-use. The EU vehicle waste directive sets high recycling targets based on weight, and thus it is strongly advisable for the relatively heavy bipolar plates to be recycled, even though energy recovery by incineration may be a cheaper and possible more environmentally benign option. The EU vehicle directive will put pressure on the end-of-life options for the PEMFC stack to be weighted towards recycling and re-use; it will have a significant impact on the design and end-of-life options for the PEMFC. The overall effect of this pressure on the end-of-life treatment of the PEMFC and the consequential contribution to environmental life cycle impacts is discussed. It is concluded that a range of external pressures influence the selection of a suitable end-of-life management strategy, and while opportunities for re-use of components are limited, all components of the PEMFC stack could in principle be recycled. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.