BATTERY RECYCLING
Q&A
ASCEND ELEMENTS TAKES LITHIUM-ION BATTERIES FROM GRAVE TO CRADLE There exists a general perception that a product made with recycled materials is not as good as one made with raw materials. When it comes to recycling electric vehicle (EV) lithium-ion batteries, Ascend Elements is changing that view. I met with Roger Lin, Ascend Elements vice president of Global Marketing and Government Relations, to discuss his company’s recycling technologies that are cost effective, environmentally friendly, and yield the highest-quality materials.
BY ARTURO SANTIAGO, EDITORIAL DIRECTOR Arturo Santiago
Can you give me a brief history of Ascend Elements?
Roger Lin
Ascend Elements is an engineered materials company that makes lithium-ion battery materials from recycled lithium-ion batteries. It was founded in 2015 under the name Battery Resources. We’ve been working on this process for quite a while. The original work was done at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, WPI, here in Central Massachusetts. Initial patents were filed in 2012 on this unique, innovative, and efficient process to turn spent lithium-ion batteries back into new battery “active materials.” Right now we’re on the cusp of scaling up the technology with what we call Hydro-to-Cathode and are putting in large-capacity commercial operations in the United States. The first phase is in Covington, Georgia, which, once it’s operational, will be processing 30,000 metric tons per year of spent lithium-ion batteries and scrap. It’s big. And it has to be big because there are a lot of batteries that will be coming at us.
24
AS
Where do you get your materials from?
RL
The two major sources of input for our Covington facility will be end-of-life lithium-ion batteries and lithium-ion factory scrap. The most obvious source is batteries from electronics devices, electric vehicles, or other battery-powered products which have reached their end of life. But the other
recyclingproductnews.com | APRIL 2022
lesser-known source we’re getting batteries from is manufacturing scrap from gigafactories. These gigafactories produce a fair amount of scrap material. It’s all the stuff that doesn’t meet specifications during the manufacturing process. That all needs to be disposed of and handled in the right way. We’re going to be taking that scrap and returning it back into the battery supply chain to make it a truly circular manufacturing process. Somewhere between 8 and 10 percent of all the output of a lithium-ion battery factory ends up as scrap. That is going to be the majority of our feedstock for a number of years. But later in this decade, the end-of-life batteries that are coming off EVs that are being retired or scrapped will begin to overtake the manufacturing scrap side. The materials we process are a little different depending on what stage they’re coming out of. Manufacturing scrap takes many forms since it spans the entire production process of lithium-ion cells. Cells are comprised of cathode active materials and anode active materials coated onto either aluminum or copper metal foils. These foils are stacked or rolled up into an electrode stack or a jelly roll. They are then packaged inside a pouch or a metal can. The can is either a cylindrical metal can or a rectangular shaped can we call a prismatic. These are then formed into lithium-ion cells. Those cells then get turned into batteries by connecting them in series or in parallel, or a combination of both. That battery is then packaged in a strong housing, which then ends up going into the electric vehicle. At any point in the above process, something can fall out of specification and be scrapped, and thus need to be recycled.
