Glencore, one of the world’s largest global diversified natural resource companies, has established a strategic partnership with Li-Cycle Holdings, a leading lithium-ion battery recycler in North America. Glencore will subscribe for convertible debt in Li-Cycle and Li-Cycle will become a preferred partner for Glencore in the lithium-ion battery recycling sector.... Read more →

Faulty car windows often go in the recycling bin when the cracked part cannot be fixed. A closed material circuit does not yet exist for damaged car glass. This is where Audi and its partner companies Reiling Glas Recycling, Saint-Gobain Glass, and Saint-Gobain Sekurit are now doing pioneering work as... Read more →

Geomega Resources Inc., a developer of clean technologies for the mining, refining, and recycling of rare earths and other critical materials, announced that Innord Inc., its wholly owned subsidiary, has signed a term sheet with Rio Tinto to enter into a development agreement for Bauxite Residues Iron Phase Product. As... Read more →

Li-Cycle Holdings Corp. completed commercial agreements with LG Energy Solution, Ltd. for the supply of manufacturing scrap for recycling and with each of LG Energy Solution (LGES) and LG Chem, Ltd. (LGC) for the sale of nickel sulfate from Li-Cycle’s Rochester Hub. With the execution of these agreements, LGC and... Read more →

Li-Cycle has selected Veolia Water Technologies as a partner for its lithium-ion battery recycling plant in Rochester, New York. The facility will utilize Veolia’s HPD evaporation and crystallization technology to process recycled lithium-ion battery materials. Veolia’s HPD crystallization technology is key in a final stage of the battery recycling process... Read more →

Bridgestone Americas is partnering with LanzaTech to address end-of-life tire waste. The two companies will co-develop the first dedicated end-of-life tire recycling process leveraging LanzaTech’s proprietary CCT (Carbon Capture and Transformation) technology, creating a pathway toward tire material circularity and the decarbonization of new tire production. According to the Tire... Read more →

The BMW Group will use cast aluminum wheels produced with 100% green power for its BMW and MINI brands from 2024 onwards. For the BMW Group, this is another step towards its goal of creating the most sustainable supply chain in the automotive industry. The transition applies, in particular, to... Read more →

An EIT RawMaterials-supported vanadium recovery joint venture in Finland between two Australian project development companies—Critical Metals Ltd and Neometals Ltd—plans to increase high-purity vanadium production in Europe for use in grid-scale vanadium redox flow batteries (VRFBs), specialty steel applications and next-generation lithium vanadium cells. The Vanadium Recovery Project (VRP) is... Read more →

BASF has signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Zhejiang REEF Technology Co., Ltd. to develop state-of-the-art recyclate formulations for applications used in the automotive, packaging and consumer industries. The plastics industry is seeking ways to incorporate higher content of recycled polymeric material in all major applications to meet sustainability goals,... Read more →

The cobalt, manganese and nickel found in battery cathodes are expensive to mine; scientists have for years sought a way to create new batteries from spent ones. When a car battery reaches the end of its service life, it is collected, dismantled and shredded. The shredded material is processed to... Read more →

Canada-based Rock Tech Lithium will collaborate with the Fraunhofer Institute for Environmental, Safety and Energy Technology UMSICHT and Circulor, the UK-based sustainable supply chain traceability provider, to achieve comprehensive CO2 transparency of Rock Tech’s lithium value chain—from the raw material, spodumene, to the end product, lithium hydroxide. Rock Tech, which... Read more →

The US Department of Energy (DOE) announced up to $48 million in funding for a new Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) program—Converting UNF Radioisotopes Into Energy (CURIE)—that will support the deployment of Advanced Nuclear Reactor (AR) technology by providing safe and sustainable domestic fuel stocks. (DE-FOA-0002691) The US has accumulated... Read more →

A team of researchers from the Critical Materials Institute (CMI), a US Department of Energy Innovation Hub led by the Ames Laboratory, developed a novel way to extract rare earth elements from the high-powered magnets in electronic waste (earlier post). Recently, TdVib LLC, a company based out of Boone, Iowa,... Read more →

Teijin Limited has agreed to form a business alliance with Fuji Design Co., Ltd., a Japanese manufacturer of recycled carbon fibers to establish a business structure for the production, supply and commercialization of carbon fiber reinforced plastic (CFRP) products made from recycled carbon fibers using a low environmental impact process.... Read more →

Redwood Materials, founded by Tesla co-founder and former CTO JB Straubel (earlier post), is launching the most comprehensive electric vehicle battery recycling program, beginning in California, to establish efficient, safe and effective recovery pathways for end-of-life hybrid and electric vehicle battery packs. Ford Motor Company and Volvo Cars are the... Read more →

Ascend Elements, a vertically integrated lithium-ion battery recycling and engineered materials company and Koura, an Orbia business and one of the world’s largest producers of fluoroproducts and technologies, launched a proprietary process technology yielding battery-grade graphite material from spent lithium-ion batteries. Orbia is serving as a development partner to Ascend... Read more →

Virgin Group and chemical conversion technology company Agilyx (earlier post) are forming a strategic partnership to research and develop lower carbon fuel facilities to help address plastic pollution and the global transition to net zero. Virgin Group and Agilyx aim to reuse plastic waste to produce synthetic crude oil that... Read more →

Umicore, a global materials technology group, is a pioneer in the recycling of rechargeable batteries; its battery recycling plant in Hoboken, Belgium, has an annual capacity of 7,000 tons of lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries and battery production scrap, the equivalent of 35,000 electric vehicle (EV) batteries. The plant started operations in... Read more →

The US Department of Energy (DOE) has issued two notices of intent to provide a total of $2.91 billion to boost production of the advanced batteries that are critical to rapidly growing clean energy industries of the future, including electric vehicles and energy storage. DOE intends to fund battery materials... Read more →

BASF and Heraeus have agreed to form a joint venture (BASF: 50%; Heraeus: 50%) to recover precious metals from spent automotive catalysts. The new company, named BASF HERAEUS (China) Metal Resource Co., Ltd will be set up in Pinghu, China. The founding of the legal entity is targeted in Q1... Read more →

The Rice lab of chemist James Tour has successfully extracted valuable rare earth elements (REE) from waste at yields high enough to resolve issues for manufacturers while boosting their profits. The lab’s flash Joule heating process, introduced several years ago to produce graphene from any solid carbon source (earlier post),... Read more →

Glencore has entered a battery recycling joint venture with strategic partner Britishvolt, the UK’s foremost investor in battery cell technologies and R&D. The joint venture will develop an ecosystem for battery recycling in the UK. This ecosystem will be anchored at a new recycling plant located at the Britannia Refined... Read more →

China-based battery giant CATL has selected technology lifecycle solutions company TES to deliver after-sales services for its battery products. This initial agreement will see TES Sustainable Battery Solutions service CATL’s clients, who use its energy storage solutions in 12 countries within Asia-Pacific (APAC). The rollout will be delivered over three... Read more →

Manufacturers add synthetic antioxidants to plastics, rubbers and other polymers to make them last longer. However, the health effects of these compounds, and how readily they migrate into the environment, are largely unknown. Now, researchers have detected a broad range of emerging synthetic antioxidants, called hindered phenol and sulfur antioxidants,... Read more →

Li-Cycle will operate its sixth and largest lithium-ion battery recycling Spoke facility co-located at the Ultium Cells battery cell manufacturing mega-factory site in Warren, Ohio. Ultium Cells is a joint venture between General Motors and LG Energy Solution. This new Spoke continues Li-Cycle’s strategic execution and focus on growing its... Read more →

Canada-based Lithion Recycling closed a first tranche of Series A equity with a strategic group of investors led by IMM Investment Global Limited and supported by Fondaction and its managed fund, the LCC Fund. The size of the first round is expected to reach up to C$125 million (US$99 million).... Read more →

Researchers in China report using air oxidation–water leaching to recover lithium selectively from spent LiFePO4 (LFP) material, in which the high leaching efficiency of lithium and the good separation effect of lithium and iron were achieved simultaneously. An open-access paper on their work is published in the RSC journal Green... Read more →

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... Read more →

Veolia, the UK’s leading resource management company, has announced its first electric vehicle battery recycling facility in the UK, which will have the capacity to process 20% of the UK’s end-of-life electric vehicle batteries by 2024. Many of the materials required for battery manufacturing rely on traditional water and energy... Read more →

Murata Manufacturing and Michelin have co-developed a new generation of RFID modules that are embedded into tires. The robust passive RFID tags require no external power supply and will continue to operate while being driven on for extremely high mileages. This simple yet elegant technology delivers low-cost and easy tire... Read more →

Ford has become the first automaker to use 100% recycled ocean plastics to produce automotive parts. Wiring harness clips in Ford Bronco Sport models are made of ocean-harvested plastic—commonly referred to as “ghost gear.” The strength and durability of the nylon material equals that of previously used petroleum-based parts but... Read more →

American Battery Technology Company recently received a competitively bid $2-million contract award from the United States Advanced Battery Consortium LLC (USABC), in collaboration with the US Department of Energy (DOE), for the commercial demonstration of its integrated lithium-ion battery recycling system and production of battery cathode grade metal products; the... Read more →

The Suppliers Partnership for the Environment (SP) and the Automotive Industry Action Group (AIAG) have published a new guidance document, “Measuring Recycled Content of Automotive Products.” The guidance document was produced through a collaborative process by the Suppliers Partnership for the Environment’s (SP) Materials Efficiency Work Group, whose members include... Read more →

Asahi Kasei, a diversified Japanese multinational company, concluded an agreement with Shell Eastern Petroleum (Pte) Ltd. regarding the supply of butadiene derived from plastic waste and biomass. Asahi Kasei plans to begin producing and marketing sustainable solution-polymerized styrene-butadiene rubber (S-SBR) using sustainable butadiene at its plant in Singapore by the... Read more →

FREYR Battery, a developer of clean, next-generation battery cell production capacity and Glencore International AG, one of the world’s largest global diversified natural resource companies, have signed a contract for the supply of up to 1,500 metric tons of high-grade, sustainably-sourced cobalt metal cut cathodes made from partially recycled cobalt... Read more →

Scientists at Argonne National Laboratory will host a short (15-minute) webinar on 7 December at 10:00 am CT on “Clearing the path to recycling batteries at scale.” Materials scientists Jessica Durham and Albert Lipson will describe their breakthrough work on how to recover, separate and regenerate the cathode material at... Read more →

Northvolt’s recycling program, Revolt (earlier post), recently produced its first lithium-ion battery cell featuring a nickel-manganese-cobalt (NMC) cathode produced with metals recovered through the recycling of battery waste. All recycling and production processes were completed on a single site, at Northvolt Labs in Västerås, Sweden. What we have shown here... Read more →

NFI Group, a leading independent bus and coach manufacturer and a leader in electric mass mobility solutions, has expanded its partnership with North America’s largest lithium-ion battery recycler, Li-Cycle Corp., to offer heavy-duty electric vehicle battery recycling to public transit customers in North America through Li-Cycle. The partnership builds upon... Read more →

The United States Advanced Battery Consortium LLC (USABC) is awarding $2 million to lithium-ion (Li-ion) recycling development project, “Strategic Collaboration for the Development of a Self-Sustaining Model for the Recycling of Large-Format Lithium-Ion (Li-ion) Batteries,” with American Battery Technology Company (ABTC). The contract award includes a 75% cost share by... Read more →

Researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich, Switzerland, have developed a carbon-supported platinum nanoparticle catalyst that can achieve complete hydrocracking of polypropylene into liquid hydrocarbons (C5–C45). With tuning, the catalyst can achieve a selectivity of 80% toward motor oil (C21–C45). A paper on their work is published... Read more →

BASF and SVOLT have entered into an agreement in which both parties will partner throughout their global operations with regards to cathode active materials (CAM) development, raw materials supply and battery recycling for SVOLT’s battery cells. The cooperation will also enhance the research and development (R&D) capabilities for both companies... Read more →

Koch Strategic Platforms (KSP), a subsidiary of Koch Investments Group, will invest $100 million in lithium-ion battery recycler Li-Cycle (earlier post) through purchase of a convertible note to support the company’s rapidly expanding growth opportunities in North America, Europe and Asia. In addition to the new capital, Li-Cycle, along with... Read more →

Researchers in the EU RECOTRANS (Integrated manufacturing of REcyclable multi-material COmposites for the TRANSport sector) have used microwaves and laser welding to obtain recyclable composites for automotive and transport. The project, led by AIMPLAS, is intended to help produce lighter and, therefore, less polluting vehicles without increasing costs. RECOTRANS researchers... Read more →

Ford Motor Company and Redwood Materials are collaborating to build out battery recycling and a domestic battery supply chain for electric vehicles. Ford and Redwood’s goal is to make electric vehicles more sustainable, drive down the cost for batteries, and ultimately help make electric vehicles accessible and affordable for more... Read more →

BASF SE (BASF) and Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Limited (CATL) announced a strategic partnership on battery materials solutions, including cathode active materials (CAM) and battery recycling. The collaboration aims at developing a sustainable battery value chain, in support of CATL’s localization in Europe and contributes to achieving both companies’ global... Read more →

KULR Technology Group, a developer of lithium-ion battery safety and thermal management technologies, will provide its KULR-Tech Safe Case to lithium-ion battery recycler Heritage Battery Recycling (HBR), a new platform company of The Heritage Group, for the safe transportation logistics of HBR’s battery collection operations across North America. (Earlier post.)... Read more →

Heritage Battery Recycling, LLC and plasma technology company 6K announced an exclusive joint development agreement to produce new cathode material from recycled batteries. The process uses Heritage’s established network infrastructure to collect, store, and process end-of-life batteries, combined with 6K’s plasma technology to manufacture critical cathode-grade battery materials needed to... Read more →

Nissan Motor Co., Ltd. and Waseda University have started testing in Japan of a jointly developed recycling process that efficiently recovers high-purity rare-earth compounds from electrified vehicle motor magnets. The testing is aimed at enabling practical application of the new process by the mid-2020s. Most motors in electrified vehicles use... Read more →

Johnson Matthey, a global leader in sustainable technologies, has entered into an agreement with OnTo Technology, a developer of advanced battery recycling solutions, to scale up OnTo’s patented process for the direct recycling of lithium-ion battery scrap. The partners will collaborate with the UK Battery Industrialization Center (UKBIC), the newly... Read more →

SABIC introduced the company’s first automotive grades containing mechanically recycled content within the company’s TRUCIRCLE portfolio of circular solutions and services. The new resins are SABIC T2E-3320EH PP compound, a high-flow, low-emission, talc-filled polypropylene (PP); XENOY T2NX2500UV resin, an unfilled, UV-stabilized blend of polycarbonate (PC) and polyethylene terephthalate (PET); and... Read more →