{"id":627986,"date":"2023-04-11T09:49:21","date_gmt":"2023-04-11T14:49:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.sellorbuyhomefast.com\/index.php\/2023\/04\/11\/the-biggest-ev-battery-recycling-plant-in-the-us-is-open-for-business\/"},"modified":"2023-04-11T09:49:21","modified_gmt":"2023-04-11T14:49:21","slug":"the-biggest-ev-battery-recycling-plant-in-the-us-is-open-for-business","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2023\/04\/11\/the-biggest-ev-battery-recycling-plant-in-the-us-is-open-for-business\/","title":{"rendered":"The biggest EV battery recycling plant in the US is open for business"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\nAscend Elements\u2019 new recycling plant in Covington, Georgia is processing used lithium-ion batteries and manufacturing scrap into useful materials for the clean energy transition.\n<\/p>\n

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The interior of Ascend Elements’ Covington, Georgia recycling facility (Ascend Elements<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
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Getting rid of old batteries can be a\u00a0hassle. But for recycling startup Ascend Elements, other people\u2019s garbage is basically a\u00a0gold mine, if not better.<\/p>\n

The Massachusetts-based company opened a\u00a0recycling plant in Covington, Georgia in late March that it says is the largest electric-vehicle battery recycling facility in North America. It can process 30<\/span>,000<\/span> metric tons of input each year, breaking down old batteries and prepping the most valuable materials inside to be processed and turned into new batteries.<\/p>\n

That capacity equates to breaking down the battery packs from 70<\/span>,000<\/span> electric vehicles annually, said Ascend CEO<\/span> Mike O\u2019Kronley.<\/p>\n

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This is an early example of a\u00a0nationwide movement to cost-effectively recycle and repurpose EV<\/span> batteries as more and more drivers go electric. In previous decades, companies hadn\u2019t invested much in lithium-ion recycling, but investment soared<\/a> in the last few years to match the spiking demand for battery materials<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Recycling can deliver new battery materials without the expense and environmental impact of new mining. It is extremely hard to develop new mines in the U.S., but the federal government is lavishing funds on new battery recycling plants. The revamped EV<\/span> tax credits also call for increasing shares of domestically sourced batteries and battery materials.<\/p>\n

Those market and policy shifts made recycling sufficiently desirable that Ascend is paying other companies for their old batteries. At the moment, those deals are mostly with EV<\/span> or battery makers that have high volumes to get rid\u00a0of.<\/p>\n

\u201c<\/span>Paying for these spent batteries keeps them from going into the landfill,\u201d O\u2019Kronley told Canary Media. <\/span>\u200b\u201c<\/span>It\u2019s better to get paid for it rather than throw them\u00a0away.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ascend also accepts used consumer electronics from battery-collection programs, such as Call2<\/span>Recycle<\/a>.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not to say there are enough old batteries coming in to fill the factory. Currently, 80<\/span> to 90<\/span> percent of what\u2019s going into Ascend\u2019s Covington facility is scrap materials from battery factories, including SK<\/span> Battery America\u2019s plant in Commerce, Georgia.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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That relationship influenced Ascend\u2019s choice of location: Covington sits in the emerging <\/span>\u200b\u201c<\/span>Battery Belt,\u201d a\u00a0swath of new battery factories and electric-vehicle plants opening up across the Midwest and the Carolinas, Georgia, Tennessee and Kentucky (look for all the blue icons in this White House map<\/a> of new industrial investments). Fellow battery-recycling startup Redwood Materials also chose South Carolina for a\u00a0forthcoming $3<\/span>.5<\/span> billion recycling facility.<\/p>\n

\u201c<\/span>There will need to be a\u00a0recycling plant within about an hour\u2019s drive of every single one of those [new battery gigafactories],\u201d O\u2019Kronley said. <\/span>\u200b\u201c<\/span>You don\u2019t want to be [long-distance] shipping these very large, heavy EV<\/span> batteries that are classified as Class 9<\/span>\u00a0hazardous materials.\u201d<\/p>\n

As it stands, the nearby battery factories send their scrap down the road to Ascend for what\u2019s called <\/span>\u200b\u201c<\/span>pre-processing.\u201d The scrap and used batteries go through mechanical shredding and sieving, which produces <\/span>\u200b\u201c<\/span>black mass.\u201d Ascend extracts lithium carbonate from the mass; the remaining mass contains materials such as graphite, nickel, cobalt and manganese.<\/p>\n

Currently, Ascend sells most of these substances to the market; it also converts some black mass into cathode precursor and cathode active materials at its Massachusetts R&<\/span>D center. But the company is building a\u00a0second commercial-scale facility in Hopkinsville, Kentucky that will take the outputs from Covington and convert them into cathode precursor and cathode active material so that they\u2019re ready to go into new battery manufacturing. That $1<\/span> billion plant received $480<\/span> million in grant funding<\/a> from the Department of Energy as part of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law\u2019s investment in domestic supply for critical materials.<\/p>\n

The Covington plant operates similarly to existing battery recycling plants; the Kentucky location will introduce a\u00a0brand-new technique for efficiently extracting cathode materials from black mass, which Ascend has dubbed <\/span>\u200b\u201c<\/span>hydro to cathode.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201c<\/span>Those two facilities represent the investment that we are making in key infrastructure to recover these batteries, retain these critical elements in the United States and return them into the supply,\u201d O\u2019Kronley said.<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s just the start, because the surging popularity of EVs<\/a> will produce far more worn-out batteries than the country\u2019s recyclers can process. Ascend is already out raising money to build more plants, according to O\u2019Kronley.<\/p>\n

Other emerging recycling startups are at it too. Redwood Materials, founded by Tesla co-founder JB<\/span> Straubel, won a $2<\/span> billion loan from the DOE<\/span><\/a> for a\u00a0Nevada plant to make new batteries from recycled materials. Canada-based Li-Cycle received a $375<\/span> million DOE<\/span> loan<\/a> for its own facility to process lithium carbonate from a\u00a0network of recycling plants. Canary Media recently profiled Cirba Solutions\u2019 efforts to expand a\u00a0battery-recycling plant in Ohio<\/a>.<\/p>\n

All of these facilities tie into the Biden administration\u2019s goal to make the U.S. more capable of supplying itself with the batteries that will be pivotal to electrifying transportation and decarbonizing the\u00a0grid.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\n Maribel Schildgen<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ascend Elements\u2019 new recycling plant in Covington, Georgia is processing used lithium-ion batteries and manufacturing scrap into useful materials for the clean energy transition. 10 April 2023 The interior of Ascend Elements’ Covington, Georgia recycling facility (Ascend Elements) Getting rid of old batteries can be a\u00a0hassle. But for recycling startup Ascend Elements, other people\u2019s garbage<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":627987,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25192,171,46],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-627986","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-battery","category-biggest","category-technology"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/627986","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=627986"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/627986\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/627987"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=627986"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=627986"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=627986"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}