Li-cycle will build North America's largest lithium ion battery recycling factory

　　Author ：Iflowpower – Færanleg rafstöð birgir

Later this year, Canadian company Li-cycle will begin to invest $ 17.5 million in Rochester, New York, Rochester, New York City. After completion, it will become the largest lithium-ion battery recycling factory in North America.

The plant will eventually have a production capacity of 25 metric tons of input materials, which can recover 95% or more cobalt, nickel, lithium and other valuable elements through the company's zero waste, zero emission process. Ajaykochhar, the joint founder and CEO of Li-cycle, said: "We will become one of the largest nickel and lithium sources in the United States, and the only cobalt source in the United States. "Li-cycle is established at the end of 2016, is committed to preventing thousands of lithium-ion batteries from entering the landfill.

In 2019, only more than half of the resources of 180,000 tons of lithium-ion batteries, only slightly more than half of the resources were recovered. As the production of lithium-ion batteries has increased, the interest in recycling is also increasing. CircularenergyStorage in London is a consulting company that tracking lithium-ion battery recycling markets.

According to about 100 companies around the world, there is a lithium-ion battery, or plan to do so as soon as possible. The industry focuses in China and South Korea, there have been most batteries, but there are dozens of recycling companies in North America and Europe. In addition to li-cycle, the list also includes Northvolt, headquartered in Stockholm, which combines an electric car battery recycling factory with Norwegian Hydro, and the Redwoodmaterials of Tesla alumni JBstraubel, which reclaims electronic waste.

These start-ups aim to automate, simplify and clean up labor intensive, inefficient and dirty processes. Traditionally, the battery recovery involves combustion them to recover some of the metal, or "black block" generated by grinding the battery and produced by solvent. Jeffspangenberger, director of RecellCenter, said that battery recycling is not only cleaner, but also needs reliability, which is a battery recovery research cooperation in the US Department of Energy.

RecellCenter. Spangenberger said: "Recycling battery is better than our new materials and throwing it away. However, the recycling company is hard to profit.

We need to make it cost effective so that people have power to reload their batteries. "Workers' Li-Cycle Recycling Station near Toronto is classified Li-cycle will run in the" spokes and hub "mode, and the spokes will handle old batteries and waste batteries, and feeding the black blocks to the center hub. Medium, take the final processing into a battery level material.

The company's first spokesperson near Toronto, the headquarters of Li-Cycle is located in Toronto. Rochester has just opened a second spokesman, the hub will open in 2022. LI-CYCLE engineers have an iterative improvement in traditional wet metallurgical recycling, Kochhar said.

For example, they did not disassemble the EV battery pack into a battery and discharge, but divide the battery pack into a larger module and processed without discharging. For battery chemistry, li-cycle is unknown. The mainstream nickel manganese cobalt oxide battery is easy to recover as the battery based on lithium phosphate iron.

Kochhar pointed out. There is no uniformity in the industry, we don't know the correct chemical composition of the battery, you don't need to know. How many batteries need to be recycled? In the introduction, Kochhar refers to the "tsunami" of the used lithium ion battery.

The global sales of electric vehicles are expected to rise from 1.7 million vehicles in 2020 to 26 million in 2030, it is hard to imagine that we will be flooded by waste batteries. However, HanSericmelin, a circular energy storage, said that the life of the lithium-ion battery is very long.

"30% from the second-hand electric car from the US market is now in Russia, Ukraine and Jordan, and the battery is carried in the journey," Merlin said. EV batteries can also be reused for fixed storage. He said that these (second-hand) products still have a lot of values.

Merlin estimates that by 2030, the United States will recover about 80 metric tons of lithium-ion batteries, and 132 metric tons of Europe will. He said: "Every (recovered) company is building a factory that can reach thousands of tons of production, but you can't recover more materials than yourself. "The materials that can be recovered from the lithium-ion battery include various metals and plastic Recell's spangenberger, temporarily do not increase the demand for battery recovery.

This is why his team's research focuses on long-term projects, including direct cathode recycling. Traditional recycling will decompose the cathode into a metal salt, and the salt is heavy and the catholic is very expensive. Recell plans to show an economic effective way to recover the cathode powder this year, but it is necessary for a five-year time to prepare a large amount of application of these processes.

Even if the battery is not coming, Kochhar said that consumer electronics and electric cars are now interested in li-cycle service. "Usually, they will drive suppliers to cooperate with us, which is great for us, and it is really interesting. Kochhar said.

Spangenberger said: "Researchers participating in the recycling work is very enthusiastic about their work - this is a huge technical challenge, they want to figure out this is because this is the right practice, but there are also a place to make money, this is attractive. ".