Millions of batteries diverted from landfills?

The time to develop a recycling strategy for the mountains of renewable energy components hitting end-of-life in the next decade is now. The good news is that the activity level in the area of recycling has markedly increased over the last year.

The best news: the area is attracting major capital investments.

Ascend Elements recently raised $542 million to fund its efforts to recycle lithium-ion batteries. The company’s goal is to convert old batteries into usable cathode active materials. At its Georgia plant, Ascend currently processes the “black mass” into lithium carbonate, a key mineral for lithium-ion batteries.

The latest investment will go towards building a $1 billion facility in Kentucky that will increase the molecular precision of the materials produced. The facility is expected to produce enough material to manufacture 750,000 EVs a year.

Ascend has a patent on its “Hydro-to-Cathode” process, a technique originally developed by researchers at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute over a decade ago. Peer-reviewed research has found that the materials the company will produce from recycled batteries perform just as well as newly mined materials.

Excellent.

Over the last year more than $53 billion has been invested in U.S. EV battery and supply-chain manufacturing. The Department of Energy expects U.S. battery production capacity to hit 1,000 gigawatt-hours by 2030.

Hence the need to start getting our recycling act together today. A commercially viable approach to reuse lithium-ion batteries will not only reduce waste, but also the amount of lithium we need to mine in the future. A win-win.