You may not know it, but there’s a lithium-ion battery powering your life today. From your laptop, to your smartphone, to your electric vehicle, these batteries have basically taken over the globe. But like everything else in the world that requires consumers, the result is tons and tons of lifeless batteries left to rot after their use is up.
Thankfully, a new company is working towards breaking these batteries down and extracting a whopping 95% of their useful and valuable material for recycling and reuse. And thankfully, the investments keep coming in.
Recycling plants in Rochester, New York and in Canada now have the ability to save tens of thousands of tons of old batteries thrown away annually, removing their waste while helping recycle them, basically creating their very own battery recycling world.
The company, named Li-Cycle, which uses the periodic table’s call sign for the metal lithium, claims that their “Spoke and Hub” personal recycling method is incredibly cost-effective, which means battery manufacturers can afford their recycled material made from the old batteries.
Regardless of a battery’s size or shape, it can be broken down by a mechanical process that leads to two types of raw materials. One is the ‘line of cathode and anode waste’ that comes in a black powder consisting of lithium, cobalt, aluminum, nickel, copper, and graphite. The other is scrap aluminum and copper that comes from the conducting or insulating foils.
As for the black powder waste, it goes through another recovery process which produces high quality lithium carbonate with the same required purity that’s needed for cathode precursor and production. In turn, this efficiently and successfully closes the loop on the grams of lithium as well. In addition, cobalt and nickel sulphates are also produced.
Since it began, the company has attracted big time investors that are looking to source ‘sustainable lithium and other minerals,’ since the mining which is popularly used to gather them is a large source of emissions, sometimes deforestation, and even regional conflict at times.
Major device and appliance conglomerate, LG, is also looking at a $50 million investment into Li-Cycle, while having enough lithium batterie to be harvested that may reach 20,000 tons of nickel in a span of 10 years.
As announced by electronic bus and van maker, Arrival, just a few weeks before LG’s, they signed an ‘exclusive closed-loop agreement with Li-Cycle’ to supply them the required batteries for their vehicles. The contract also states that they will recycle them at the end of their lifespan so that they can also provide the next set of batteries needed by the EV company. It would seem that the future of batteries has truly arrived.
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