554 words

Li-Cycle’s original Kingston operation is relatively small, but it encompasses much of the battery recycling process. On the day of my visit, a truckload of consumer batteries from laptops, cell phones, and power tools has come in, delivered by a “recycling” company that picked them up from a big hardware store. It all gets loaded onto a conveyor belt, where workers strip off whatever can easily be removed—plastic casing, foam packaging, and so on—and check the labels on each one to make sure they are lithium-ion batteries and not some other type. It’s a surprisingly labor intensive process. A human being has to pick up every single battery. Electric car batteries, which are made up of hundreds of small cells packaged in a housing that can be as big as a mattress, also have to be taken apart by hand. 

Once it has passed inspection, the mismatched flock of batteries continues up the conveyor belt until it gets dumped into a column of water that carries it down into a shredder. The machine’s mighty steel teeth rip the batteries into tiny pieces, like tree branches run through a wood chipper. Whatever plastic is still mixed in floats to the top of the water and is skimmed off.

The metals are separated out in a series of further steps. Breakfast Cereal-sized flakes of copper and aluminum get poured into large, heavy plastic bags. Most of what’s left is what’s known as black mass—a grainy sludge of other battery ingredients, including lithium, cobalt, and nickel. LiCycle will sell the copper and aluminum flakes to a company like Glencore, which will handle the final stage of melting them down and reconstituting them as pure metal, completing the recycling cycle. Similarly, Li-Cycle will sell the black mass to some other company that will use chemical processes to separate out the metals for reuse. (Li-Cycle aims to handle more of these steps in their future plants.) Recycling everything, however, is tough. A certain amount of some metals—especially lithium—is usually left behind. 

Ironically, one of the major difficulties facing battery recyclers like LiCycle at the moment is a shortage of batteries to recycle. The industry is building facilities at a breakneck pace, so fast that analysts expect factory capacity to outstrip available feedstock in the coming years. (In fact, at the time of this writing in early 2024, Li-Cycle’s rapid expansion had run it into financial troubles, causing the company to lay off dozens of employees and suspend work on a plant in Rochester, New York.) At this point, most battery recyclers are relying heavily on pre-consumer factory scrap and defective batteries sent to them from manufacturers. Electric cars themselves are still so new that, so far, very few have been junked. (And there are hardly any at all in poorer countries like Nigeria.) Even when drivers do dispose of their EVs, the batteries are often snapped up for use in things like off-grid power storage—an idea we’ll come back to. Most of the billions of small lithium batteries in consumer goods don’t get collected at all. 

That leaves companies like Li-Cycle hustling for supplies. “We’ve looked at doing the collection ourselves, but the economics are very challenging,” says Kochhar. “There’s no clear solution on how to get these things out of people’s drawers.” 

Excerpted from Chp 9 of Power Metal: The Race for the Resources that will shape the future by Vince Beiser.