Battery recycler Ecobat brought online its new lithium-ion battery recycling facility in Casa Grande, Arizona as part of its efforts to establish a circular battery economy. The new facility is one of three lithium recycling plants Ecobat has commissioned within a one-year period, with two others in Germany and England.
The plant is set to produce between 2,000 to 4,000 tons of recycled material this year with plans to continue expanding capacity over the next few years.
“The Arizona site is quite large and has the capacity to integrate additional dismantling systems,” said Tom Schaefer, Ecobat’s vice president of global lithium business development in a conversation with pv magazine USA, noting that the Casa Grande facility is a key part of Ecobat’s strategy to meet growing demand for lithium-ion battery recycling in North America.
The company uses a proprietary wet recycling process that relies on an inert gas layer; the resulting high-grade black mass can be processed and adapted for various use cases. Schaefer also noted that the wet recycling method allows greater control over hazardous materials.
“The black mass we produce is accepted globally,” he said, adding that Ecobat is aiming to “shorten the supply chain” and keep as much as possible in the U.S. The Casa Grande facility will work directly with automotive OEMs, battery manufacturers and e-waste companies to ensure a steady stream of dead modules, which is often another challenge in scaling up battery recycling efforts.
Schaefer also pointed out that the Arizona facility was entirely self-funded and didn’t rely on any government incentives. That’s unique in such a volatile market, he explained.
“The landscape has traditionally been quite reactive to government incentives,” he said, due to the high capex of getting recycling plants up and running. But, he explained, with federal funding freezes delaying projects, there’s now an even higher hurdle of capital and technical capacity to overcome for U.S. recyclers to be cost competitive with refiners in Asia.
Lithium-ion recycling demand is already surging as growing numbers of spent batteries enter the waste stream, particularly as the U.S. seeks to turn away from its reliance on foreign minerals.
Ecobat isn’t the only battery recycler that’s recently bumped up its U.S. operations to meet that demand for domestically-produced critical materials.
American Battery Technology Company also announced this week a doubling of their quarterly production of recycled battery materials at their Nevada facility following a $144 million grant from the Department of Energy last December.
Still, Schaefer isn’t worried about the increasingly competitive battery recycling landscape.
“The market is so new and very dynamic,” he said, noting that the space is ripe for innovation and significant change in a short period of time. “We feel very comfortable as a precision recycler producing black mass.”
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