Battery Resourcers Recycling Facility Will Open In August
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Battery Resourcers is building a $43 million, 154,000 square foot recycling facility in Georgia, which the company says will be the largest in America when it opens this coming August. The new facility will be able to recycle 30,000 metric tons of discarded lithium-ion batteries and scrap per year and return battery grade lithium, cobalt, and nickel back to the battery manufacturing supply chain. The site is strategically located near the several EV manufacturing hubs and lithium-ion battery factories that are coming to the southeast US.
“Automotive OEMs are sitting on mountains of discarded batteries and scrap, and right now they have very few options for responsible and cost-effective disposal,” says Battery Resourcers CEO Michael O’Kronley. “With this convenient US location and our next-generation technology, we are providing a sustainable solution to help minimize the need for mining while returning valuable, battery-grade materials back into the lithium-ion supply chain.
“As an industry, we need to match the capacity of the gigafactories producing millions of batteries with our own ‘gigarecycling’ facilities that can recycle millions of batteries. Our Covington facility will be the largest in North America this summer, but we encourage development of recycling facilities even larger than this one. We all win when we prevent batteries from going to landfill.”
The Covington facility will employ 150 workers and marks the first phase of Battery Resourcers’ strategic expansion. Plans are already in motion to open an additional facility for precursor and cathode-active material production in 2023 using the company’s patented Hydro-to Cathode technology. Compared to mining and production of new materials, the Hydro-to Cathode recycling process is 93% cleaner and costs 59% less.
A recent study published in the journal Joule found recycled cathode from the Hydro-to-Cathode process outperforms new cathode materials in terms of cycle life by as much as 53%. The company’s long-term plans include opening additional facilities in North America, Europe, and Asia to process up to 150,000 metric tons of lithium-ion material globally per year.
Redwood Materials is building a battery recycling facility in Nevada. Li-Cycle is building one in Alabama. CATL is investing $5 billion in a battery recycling facility in China. And yet the anti-EV forces are screaming their heads off about the environmental damage caused by lithium-ion batteries. Do you hear anything about recycling plastics, the scourge that is polluting the environment from the top of the highest mountains to the bottom of the the deepest oceans — crud that shows up in breast milk, placentas, and the brains of newborn children?
No, you bet your sweet bippy you don’t, because plastics come from oil and methane and the fossil fuel companies are flooding the internet with misinformation about electric cars so they can continue to pollute the world a little longer. The fact that lithium batteries can be recycled is huge news. It means transportation could soon be a part of a circular economy that pollutes less. It’s astonishing that small-minded people could possibly be opposed to that.
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