Battery Resourcers, a vertically integrated lithium-ion battery recycling and engineered materials company, plans to open a commercial-scale, lithium-ion battery recycling facility in Covington, Ga. When the 154,000-square-foot facility is fully operational in August 2022, it will be North America’s largest battery recycling facility with capacity to process 30,000 metric tons of discarded lithium-ion batteries and scrap per year—returning battery-grade lithium, cobalt and nickel back into the battery supply chain.

As demand for electric vehicles (EVs) increases, industry analysts and the federal government agree the United States needs to build a sustainable battery recycling infrastructure. The opening of this facility will help meet that demand.

Battery Resourcers is investing $43 million in the facility at 9172 Industrial Drive in Covington, which will bring at least 150 jobs to the community. The site is strategically located near several EV manufacturing hubs and lithium-ion gigafactories.

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. 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.

—Michael O’Kronley, CEO and Director of Battery Resourcers

The opening of the Covington facility 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 at a 59% lower cost.

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.

Resources

• Xiaotu Ma, Mengyuan Chen, Zhangfeng Zheng, Dennis Bullen, Jun Wang, Chloe Harrison, Eric Gratz, Yulin Lin, Zhenzhen Yang, Youtian Zhang, Fan Wang, David Robertson, Seoung-Bum Son, Ira Bloom, Jianguo Wen, Mingyuan Ge, Xianghui Xiao, Wah-Keat Lee, Ming Tang, Qiang Wang, Jinzhao Fu, Yubin Zhang, Bryer C. Sousa, Renata Arsenault, Peter Karlson, Nakia Simon, Yan Wang (2021) “Recycled cathode materials enabled superior performance for lithium-ion batteries, Joule, Volume 5, Issue 11, Pages 2955-2970 doi: 10.1016/j.joule.2021.09.005