When Lemon Grove Honda owners like yourselves read about “green” vehicles, you tend to think that the car’s “greenness” has everything to do with the efficiency of the engine. Maybe, if you’re really into how vehicles earn their miles per gallon, you might know about things like aerodynamics and tire inflation and so on, but for the most part, green cars, as far as most of us know, are the ones with the highest EPA numbers.
However, there can be more to the environmental friendliness of a car than just how efficiently it drives. Honda, for example, is going the extra mile to recycle the nickel-based precious metals used for hybrid batteries in older used Honda Civic Hybrid and other Honda hybrid models. Since 2012, the Civic Hybrid has used a lithium-ion battery, which also is what appears in the 2013 Honda Accord Hybrid. But for those older models, Honda would rather find ways to reuse the metal than commit resources to mining for more, and that’s something that truly will help the environment in a major way moving forward.
By recycling those nickel-metal hydride batteries and adding molten salt electrolysis to the metals, engineers can come up with a 99-percent pure product, which is for all intents and purposes identical to the fresh stuff mined directly from the earth.
In Japan, for example, Honda is already recycling batteries from Honda vehicles that were damaged in earthquakes, and that’s going to help keep mining down and the nickel-metal already out of the ground in circulation. That, folks, is the true definition of green.
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