The Who’s Who of Lithium-ion Battery Recycling

In recent years, there have many investments in battery technologies, including technologies for battery recycling. This article will present the current major battery recycling projects around the globe.

Due to serious issues surrounding global warming, it has become imperative to implement energy transformation. The Paris Agreement between counties around the world is an effort to collaborate on this transformation. It is estimated that to maintain the global temperature rise within 1.5 degrees, the consumption of electric energy as a renewable energy source will rise from 24 percent to 86 percent by 2050.

This means that the electric vehicle (EV) industry will flourish in the coming years. Countries around the world have already formulated plans to support this change. For example, Japan and Germany have set plans to ban fuel vehicles by the year 2050. It is estimated that global sales of new energy-efficient passenger vehicles are expected to reach 12 million in 2025, and the compound growth rate will reach 32.5 percent from 2019 to 2025. By 2030, the number of EVs on the road will rise to 125 million.

Demand is growing for lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries. Lithium is a rare metal and can be used for green travel, clean energy storage, cutting-edge manufacturing and medical applications. With increasing power density and declining prices, these batteries seem to be the answer to all our problems, including EVs. The automotive industry is shaping up to be the biggest end-user of Li-ion batteries.

Since Li-ion batteries are so popular, it is crucial to recycle this metal. There is a limited supply of lithium, and its mining is not environmentally friendly. Efforts must be made to establish an efficient recycling process. This also means that battery lifespan must be improved and charging fully optimized.

Different types of Li-ion batteries include:     

• Lithium nickel manganese cobalt (NMC): Used in EVs from BMW, Nissan and Volkswagen
• Lithium nickel cobalt aluminum (NCA): Used in EVs from Tesla
• Lithium cobalt oxide (LCO): Used in portable electronic devices such as cell phones, laptops, etc.

The main disadvantage of rechargeable batteries is the materials used for manufacturing them. Lead, cobalt and cadmium are toxic materials. When batteries disposed of in a landfill start decomposing, they contaminate the groundwater, topsoil and air.

Non-recycled Li-ion batteries are a hazardous waste issue. When improperly handled, this type of waste can cause fires at metal waste recovery facilities and loss of rare and valuable material that can be recycled. There is a huge potential for developing a profitable recycling business from the available Li-ion battery cathode scrap material. The challenge is to find a balance between economic technology and efficient recycling technique.

The costs for battery metal separation are usually quite high. Similar to the methods used in the mining industry, recycled batteries undergo smelting. The procedure includes using high temperatures to perform the melting and extraction process. The metals conventionally recovered during the recycling process were cobalt, nickel and copper, but not lithium since it was not in high demand. However, with the energy transformation movement and increasing demand for lithium, that is all about to change.

In 2019, LCO had the largest share in the lithium battery recycling market. LCO batteries can run for a long time and have a high energy density, so they have been integrated more into laptops, mobile phones, tablets and other electronic devices.

Although battery recycling is a relatively new direction, the expenses for the whole process are only expected to go down. More companies are investing in this technology, and more economic practices will become available. Additionally, obtaining new, raw materials is more expensive than recycling batteries. This provides a clear incentive for battery recycling besides the environmental benefits.

Companies, such as Tesla, aim toward re-using all materials from a battery and re-purposing them in a new one. This approach is called closed-loop battery recycling and is a step toward a re-use and re-purpose, aka circular, economy.

Many companies dealing with Li-ion battery recycling have partnered up to meet the growing market demands:

• Supply lithium and other battery demands for EV factories
• Increase recycling capacity
• Develop new recycling technology patents
• Assist in providing eco-friendly disposal of old batteries
• Build a roadmap for sourcing the materials used in Li-ion batteries

Generally, the battery recycling process can be divided into four main phases:

1. Disassembly: The process should be optimized to minimize the chances of pollution.
2. Extraction: This step involves company trade secrets, and it is often a patented process. It includes usage of chemicals, cleaning, filtering and reusing.
3. Purification: Individual battery metals are separated and purified into battery-grade components.
4. Supply: Battery-grade materials—lithium, cobalt, nickel, aluminum, copper and graphite—are provided to manufacturers.

For a detailed look at the battery recycling process, see our two0part article on Battery Recycling Technologies: Part 1: Introduction and Recycling Preparation and Part 2: Recycling Lead-Acid and Li-ion.

Many battery recycling companies have formed around the globe in recent years. Here, we’ll look at some of the major recycling players and projects.

American Battery Technology (ABT, formerly American Battery Metals Corporation) is focused on a clean-technology platform that provides more effective production of metals used in EVs, grid storage and electronics batteries. Its green battery-production platform seeks to enable a circular economy that provides sustainable sourcing of critical battery materials. Using the closed-loop battery recycling process, it recovers individual metals from old batteries and advances them to battery-grade specifications to be sold back for new battery production. The green battery-production platform involves several steps:

1. Recycling and recovering of Li-ion batteries and reusing the recovered metals
2. Development of new green technologies for extraction of battery metals from primary resources
3. Researching and management of new mineral resources globally

ABT recently announced a plan to open a battery-metals recycling plant in Incline Village, Nev. Recently, it has achieved three critical milestones, enabling the company to move ahead in permitting, constructing and commissioning the pilot battery recycling plant. It plans to provide a recycling capacity of 20,000 tons of scrap materials and old batteries per year.

The recycling process comprises two steps. The first step is the separation of shredded iron, shredded aluminum, shredded copper and black mass. In the second step, the following metals are extracted from the black mass: cobalt sulfate (CoSO4), electroplated copper, manganese sulfate (MnSO4) and lithium hydroxide (LiOH).

Battery Resourcers is a startup company focused on making new cathode powders for Li-ion from postindustrial waste. The company recycles Li-ion batteries and manufactures valuable cathode materials.

Battery Resourcers synthesis NMC cathode materials from spent Li-ion batteries from any battery chemistry. The produced NMC cathode materials are fully compatible in size and chemistry with materials used in battery manufacturing factories and can be directly used for new battery production. The production process uses less energy than regular cathode synthesis and does not generate any toxic waste. It is possible to recover over 90 percent of all the materials from batteries. The battery made from recycled materials in a Battery Resourcers pilot project had a 32 percent longer life cycle than the reference battery produced by industry-leading materials. The NMC111 battery reaches 80 percent capacity event at 4,100 cycles, higher than the reference battery with 3,100 cycles.

“What if I told you that at Battery Resourcers we are producing, at the pilot scale, NMC cathode material that can last 300,000 miles, essentially the life of your car? And, what if I told you that we are making these materials from spent batteries through a proprietary recovery and recycling process? How would that change your approach to viewing vehicle electrification?” wrote Joe Bush, the company’s vice president of Product Development.

Northvolt is a Swedish battery startup founded by former Tesla executives in 2016. Northvolt has already built a pilot recycling project called Revolt. In cooperation with aluminum company Hydro, Northvolt plans to open a recycling plant in Norway in 2021 with a recycling capacity of 8,000 tons per year. It has an ambitious plan to build a giga-scale recycling facility for Li-ion batteries with an initial capacity of 4 GWh. The facility will also be capable of recycling lithium in addition to cobalt, nickel, manganese and other metals. The Northvolt target is to cover a 25 percent market in Europe by 2030, in which 50 percent of battery materials will come from recycled batteries. Battery recycling involves many complex tasks to disassemble packs down to cell level. Since Northolt also designs new batteries, it can consider battery recyclability when designing them.

Tesla, the world’s most valuable EV manufacturer, has announced that its batteries can be 100 percent recycled. Tesla has already started a battery recycling service building at its Shanghai Gigafactory in China. However, Tesla’s first focus is to extend battery life before they are recycled. Tesla EVs usually use NCM batteries, in which the main materials are nickel, manganese, cobalt and lithium hydroxide. Tesla is also planning to use lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries with lithium carbonate as the main building material.

Brunp Recycling Technology is a high-tech company established in 2005 specializing in the recycling and processing of rechargeable battery waste from various battery types, such as nickel-hydrogen, nickel-cadmium and Li-ion batteries. The company’s focus is to promote the sustainable development of the EV industry, which also includes properly handling battery waste. Since this company is a subsidiary of the leading Li-ion battery maker, CATL, it aims to build a closed-loop of battery production, utilization, cascade utilization, recycling and resource regeneration.

Brunp is currently the largest battery recycler in the world. Its new plant in China’s Hunan province has a recycling capacity of 100,000 tons of Li-ion battery scrap per year. Guangdong Brunp Recycling has a battery waste disposal capacity of 120,000 tons, with a metal recovery rate of 99.3 percent for nickel, cobalt and manganese.

After an explosion at a Brunp Recycling Technology factory in Hunan, the company called for an increased focus on battery safety. The accident killed one person and seriously injured six others. The accident was caused by fire from waste aluminum foil and has triggered a renewed scrutiny of safety risks in battery manufacturing and recycling. These kinds of accidents are happening in other facilities as well, such as a 2019 explosion at an energy-storage facility in Arizona and a series of fires at facilities in South Korea.

Ganfeng Lithium is a Chinese Li-ion battery manufacturer that also plans to build a battery-recycling plant in Mexico. This plan should supply the growing U.S. EV market, recycling Tesla batteries and the batteries from Chinese electric buses used in Latin America. Together with British minerals company Bacanora, Ganfeng manages Mexico's first lithium mine in Sonora.

Green Li-ion is a Singapore startup planning to open its second recycling plant in the first half of 2021. Its goal is to recycle Li-ion battery cathodes with a purity of 99.9 percent. It plans to introduce innovative recycling technology to make the process much faster and more economical—10 times faster with a quarter of the cost—than current technologies.

Li-Cycle is a Canadian company founded in 2016. They are building a $175 million recycling plant in Rochester, New York, which will be the largest Li-ion battery recycling plant in North America. The goal is to recover critical materials from Li-ion batteries and reintroduce them back into the supply chain.

Umicore is a leading battery materials recycler with 11,000 employees worldwide. Umicore is focused on recycling all components of electric vehicles. Its recycling plant in Hoboken, Belgium, has a Li-ion recycling capacity of 7,000 metric tons a year. According to Umicore, that represents around 250,000,000 mobile phone batteries, 2,000,000 electric bike batteries or 35,000 EV batteries. Umicore recycles Li-ion, lithium polymer, and nickel metal hydride batteries (NiMH) from all applications.

To learn more about the current state of battery recycling, engineering.com spoke with Zarko Meseldzija, chief technical officer at American Manganese. This company focuses on recycling Li-ion cathode critical materials with a patented recycling process called RecycLiCo. It has already tested different cathode chemistries (battery types), such as NMC, NCA, LMO and LCO.

“The idea of the innovative recycling approach was born in 2010 when the company was working on developing a process for a very low-grade manganese deposit (2-3 percent),” Meseldzija explained. “As the conventional methods for treating the material have not been economical, we have created a process that uses sulfuric acid leach technique with SO2 as reducing agent.”

Conventional recycling methods are inefficient and environmentally unfriendly, with a high energy requirement and toxic waste by-products. Using high temperatures to extract cathode material is not efficient, as it has a low recovery rate of 40 percent to 60 percent of the nickel and cobalt and no lithium recovery. Shredding and smelting generate harmful emissions—about 2 tons of CO₂ per ton of metal.

American Manganese recycles the cathode materials because the cathode is the most valuable part of the battery and accounts for 25 percent of total battery costs. Active cathode materials are 31 percent of all materials in a battery, according to the Argonne National Laboratory. The recycling process is called the direct cathode to cathode approach, which results in a mixture of the cathode-active materials ready for direct use for manufacturing new batteries. It does not separate each individual material. The RecycLiCo recycling process provides high purity cathode materials that can be directly integrated into the re-manufacturing of battery cathodes using minimal processing steps. The company’s research and development projects have achieved 99.7 percent material extraction and material purities up to 99.9 percent.

American Manganese is currently focused on recycling the battery manufacturing scrap. It is interesting that people are usually focused on the final products and recycling end-of-life batteries, but the battery production process should be considered as well to account for manufacturing waste. The waste has very valuable materials that are immediately available for the final recycling step. This is a great opportunity for recycling because 10 percent to 30 percent of waste can result during the battery manufacturing process. 

The direct cathode to cathode recycling process used by American Manganese is very suitable for processing the manufacturing waste.

“Instead of sending the manufacturing waste for disposal, landfills, and smelting, why not take that waste material and through a direct cathode to cathode recycling process just integrate it directly back in new batteries?” Meseldzija asked. “I believe this could decrease battery manufacturing costs.”

Battery waste recycling contains several steps. First, cathode scraps are cut into small pieces, and the cathode-active material is separated from the aluminum foil. After the cutting and separating step, the material is ready for the leaching process. The leach solution has impurities that have to be filtered before precipitation.

The leaching process is the most important part of the recycling process, and it determines how efficient the recycling process will be. The RecycLiCo patented leaching process uses SO₂ as the reducing agent, which is an important step because it increases the rate of dissolution of the metals—especially cobalt and manganese, which have a high oxidation state. The reducing agent makes material more leachable into solution. Other approaches can use hydrogen peroxide (H₂O₂) as a reducing agent, but American Manganese thinks that SO₂ is better because H₂O₂ decomposes quickly, which can lead to a lot of reagent consumption and thus higher costs.

The next recycling step is precipitating all cathode-active materials from a leach solution. The crucial difference between American Manganese’s approach when compared to other recycling approaches is that many processes tend to selectively extract cobalt, nickel and manganese as metal sulfides. Those approaches involve additional solvent extraction steps and costs, and the produced product is still lower in the value chain (metal salts). American Manganese removes all of those materials together as the cathode active materials. For example, for NCA batteries, it removes nickel-cobalt hydroxide as a mix, not the individual materials. The final step is recovering the lithium as lithium hydroxide or carbonate, depending on the format. This approach has fewer processing steps with the goal to use the recovered material directly for manufacturing new batteries.

As we become ever more dependent on battery technology to meet our environmental imperatives, the technology behind battery recycling will continue to evolve.

What battery recycling projects are on your radar? Let us know in the comments below.