Companies Collaborate to Accelerate Battery Recycling

­It’s no exaggeration to say that battery recycling is one of the most critical actions we can take as a species – as EVs become the predominant mode of transportation, it’ll become doubly important to safely dispose of or repurpose these potentially toxic devices.

Metals and fossil fuels leader Glencore has inked a deal with battery recycler Li-Cycle to do just that. And not to belabor the point, but collaborations like that are critically important.

We just passed Earth Day a couple weeks back, and one of the main thrusts of the event is recycling – the exponential growth of lithium-ion batteries has made this popular environmental concern more prescient than ever before.

Even before lithium-ion batteries reach the end of their lifecycle, lithium-ion fires can produce potentially toxic fluoride gas emissions, amongst other items, and once these batteries have served their purpose, improper disposal can create harmful e-waste.

Enter the blossoming battery recycling market, which is expected to witness a CAGR of around 8.5% from 2019-2027, with no surprise why – battery electric vehicles have shot up dramatically recently, with a 30% growth rate from 2019-2020, where it was at 2,008,024 global units.

Under the aforementioned agreement, the Swiss-based Glencore will send burnt-out batteries and scraps to Li-Cycle, which uses hydrometallurgical processing (vs. the other major technique, pyrometallurgical processing) to melt the batteries down and recover their critical metals.

Per the terms of the deal, Li-Cycle will receive a $200 million investment from Glencore, which comes at a crucial time since, according to Li-Cycle, 15 million tons, cumulatively, of lithium-ion batteries should reach end of life globally by 2030. That’s a whole lot of potentially toxic e-waste.

The Swiss company also plans to build several recycling plants around North America.