This year, the Canadian company Li cycle will start building a $175 million plant in Rochester, New York, which was once the seat of Eastman Kodak. When completed, it will become the largest lithium-ion battery recycling plant in North America.
The plant will eventually have a capacity of 25 metric tons of input materials to recover 95% or more of cobalt, nickel, lithium and other valuable elements through the company's zero wastewater and zero discharge process. "We will be one of the largest sources of nickel and lithium in the United States and the only source of cobalt in the United States." Said Ajay Kochhar, co-founder and CEO of Li cycle.
Founded at the end of 2016, the company is part of a booming industry focused on preventing tens of thousands of tons of lithium-ion batteries from entering landfills. In 2019, only a little more than half of the 180000 tons of lithium-ion batteries that can be recycled in the world will be recycled. With the soaring production of lithium-ion batteries, people are more and more interested in recycling.
According to the London based recycling energy storage company, a consulting firm that tracks the lithium-ion battery recycling market, about 100 companies worldwide recycle lithium-ion batteries, or plan to do so soon. The industry is mainly concentrated in China and South Korea, where the vast majority of batteries are produced, but there are dozens of recycling start-ups in North America and Europe. In addition to Li cycle, the list also includes Stockholm based northvolt, which is jointly building an electric vehicle battery recycling plant with Hydro in Norway, and Redwood materials of Tesla alumni J.B. Straubel, which has a wider range of recycling electronic waste.
These startups aim to automate, streamline and clean up processes that have always been labor-intensive, inefficient and dirty. Traditionally, battery recycling involves burning batteries to recover some metals, or grinding batteries and treating the resulting "black blocks" with solvents.
Jeff spangenberger, director of the rechell center, a battery recycling research partnership supported by the U.S. Department of energy, said that battery recycling not only needs to be cleaner, but also needs to have reliable profitability. "Recycling batteries is better than mining new materials and throwing them away," spangenberger said. "But recycling companies are hard to make a profit. We need to make it cost-effective so that people have the incentive to bring their batteries back."
Workers classify lithium-ion batteries at the Li cycle recycling facility near Toronto. Workers sort lithium-ion batteries at the Li cycle recycling facility near Toronto. Photo. Li-CYCLE
Li cycle will operate in the mode of "spokes and hubs". Spokes will handle the initial treatment of old batteries and battery waste, while black blocks will enter a centralized hub for final treatment into battery grade materials. The company's first spoke is near Toronto, where Li cycle's headquarters is located; The second spoke has just opened in Rochester, and the future center is expected to open in 2022.
Kochhar said that Li cycle engineers have repeatedly improved the traditional hydrometallurgical recycling. For example, instead of dismantling the battery pack of electric vehicles into batteries and discharging them, they divide the battery pack into larger modules and deal with it without discharging.
When it comes to the chemical composition of the battery, Li cycle is unknown. Mainstream nickel manganese cobalt oxide batteries are as easy to recycle as lithium iron phosphate based batteries. "There is no uniform standard in the industry," Kochhar said. "We don't know the exact chemical composition of the battery, and we don't need to know. "
How many batteries need to be recycled? In his speech, Kochhar mentioned the "tsunami" of waste lithium-ion batteries. With the global sales of electric vehicles expected to rise from 1.7 million in 2020 to 26 million in 2030, it is easy to imagine that we will soon be flooded by waste batteries.
But lithium-ion batteries have a long life, said Hans Eric Merlin, director of the recycling energy storage company. "30% of the used electric vehicles in the U.S. market are now in Russia, Ukraine and Jordan, and batteries appear as passengers on this journey," Merlin said. Electric vehicle batteries can also be reused as fixed storage. "These [second-hand] products still have great value," he said.
Merlin estimates that about 80 metric tons of lithium-ion batteries will need to be recycled in the United States in 2030, compared with 132 metric tons in Europe. "Every [recycling] company is building a plant with thousands of tons of capacity, but you can't recycle more materials than you have," he said.
A silver battery image and photos of three stacks of materials that can be recycled from lithium-ion batteries, including various metals and plastics. Photo source: recell
Rescell's spangenberger agrees that the need to increase battery recycling capacity will not be urgent for some time. That's why his team's research has focused on long-term projects, including direct cathode recovery. The traditional recovery method is to decompose the cathode into metal salts, and the cost of re converting metal salts into cathodes is very high. Recall plans to demonstrate a cost-effective cathode powder recovery method this year, but these processes will take five years to prepare for mass applications.
Even before the battery tsunami, Kochhar said consumer electronics and electric vehicle manufacturers are now interested in Li cycle services. "Usually, they push their suppliers to cooperate with us, which is good for us, and it's really interesting to see this," Kochhar said.
"The researchers involved in recycling are very passionate about what they do - it's a huge technical challenge and they want to figure it out because it's the right thing," spangenberger said. "But you can also make money. That's attraction."
Fourteen lithium battery recycling companies worthy of attention
As part of the company's focus on mining, extracting and recycling lithium and other battery materials, American battery technology plans to open a battery metal recycling plant in inkley village, Nevada, which will eventually handle 20000 metric tons of waste materials and batteries every year.
Battery resources, a start-up company in Worcester, Massachusetts, is a derivative company of Worcester Institute of technology. It mainly uses post industrial waste to manufacture new cathode powder for lithium-ion batteries.
Brunp Recycling Technology Co., Ltd. As a subsidiary of catl, a leading lithium-ion battery manufacturer, brunp is the largest battery recycler in Asia (and the world). It is reported that its new plant in Hunan Province of China can recycle 100000 tons of lithium-ion battery waste every year.
Ganfeng lithium, a Chinese lithium battery manufacturer, plans to build a battery recycling plant in Mexico to sell minerals to electric vehicle manufacturers and suppliers, including Tesla and LG Chemical in South Korea.
Green lithium battery, a Singapore start-up, will open a second recycling plant in early 2021 to mainly recycle the cathode of lithium-ion battery with "99.9% purity".
Li cycle, later this year, the Canadian company will start building a $175 million recycling plant in Rochester, New York, which will become the largest lithium-ion battery resource recycling facility in North America.
Northvolt, a Swedish battery start-up founded by former Tesla executives in 2016, already has an experimental recycling plant in operation. In cooperation with aluminum company hydro, it plans to open a recycling plant with an annual output of 8000 tons in Norway this year.
Primobius, a joint venture between nemetals of Australia and SMS group of Germany, will demonstrate nemetals' proprietary recycling methods and plan to expand commercialization in Europe.
Recell center, a three-year, $15 million grant from the vehicle technology office of the U.S. Department of energy, focuses on long-term methods, such as direct cathode recovery.
Redwood materials, a start-up company co founded by J.B. Straubel, the former chief technology officer of Tesla, in 2017, positions itself as a raw material supplier and will generally recycle e-waste. It is one of the five initial recipients of Amazon's $2 billion climate pledge fund.
Relib company, similar to the recall center in the United States, is a research and development cooperation organization based in Faraday Institute in Birmingham, UK, which is committed to improving the recycling efficiency of electric vehicle batteries in the UK.
The company, which is a joint venture between metallico Corp. and suicot. in New York, plans to open a 5000 ton lithium ion recycling plant.
Tesla, in the past few years, Elon Musk has hinted that the electric vehicle manufacturer will recycle its batteries. It is reported that now it has begun to do so in China, and the phase II project of its Shanghai gigafactory has been completed.
Umicore, a leading material recycler with 11000 employees worldwide, has been focusing on "clean transportation" since 2017, including recycling all parts of electric vehicles. Its plant in Hoboken, Belgium, can handle 7000 metric tons of lithium-ion batteries a year.
