Start-ups try to change car battery recycling and clean up world's most polluting industry
A small number of start-ups are trying to locate a new way to recycle used car batteries, using water, chemicals and electricity to create lead rather than the hazardous, high-heat smelting that has been discovered as the world's most polluting industry.
One of the first to bring a fresh recycling technology to advertise is ACE Green Recycling Inc, which includes developed a room-temperature process that turns lead from scrap batteries into briquettes of 99.95% purity and above, its Singapore-based CEO Nishchay Chadha told Reuters.
At its recycling plant in Ghaziabad, on the outskirts of the Indian capital New Delhi, the firm then uses electric kettles to refine the briquettes into ingots which are then sold to battery manufacturers. Plastic and other elements are recycled separately.
Worldwide, the start-ups up to now form only a tiny fraction of the lead battery recycling industry, which is estimated to be a $17.5 billion each year business, counting for the lead value. However they claim the brand new technologies produce next to no emissions in comparison to traditional smelting.
Analysts and professionals said the new technologies are promising but it was too early to state if some of them was commercially viable on a large scale.
"I think it's an excellent step and whether it's economically viable it's a terrific step," CEO Richard Fuller at environmental agency Pure Earth said.
Typically, traditional battery recycling units use an ultra-hot furnace at over 1,000 degrees Celsius to refine lead components. If the machine is unregulated, as much are in poorer nations where the sales of cars and car batteries are surging, toxic fumes often escape into the air and effluents seep into groundwater.
Pure Earth and Green Cross Switzerland have said lead battery recycling may be the most polluting industry on the globe. "Emissions and fugitive dusts released from the tiny scale melting and casting of molten lead and from waste are the key exposure pathways," the agencies said in a 2016 report.
Farid Ahmed, the main lead analyst at Wood Mackenzie, said the brand new technologies had "the potential to be game-changers".
"But (they) have to reach that time where they can establish the validity of their processes when scaled up to professional degrees of output, plus that they can be competitive in production costs," he said.
Recycling of lead batteries makes up about about two-thirds of the world's way to obtain refined lead, which is also found in cables, ammunition and paints.
The metal currently trades at roughly $2,000 per tonne.
ONE PERCENT OF REFINED LEAD
"We use electricity, and our plant operates at room temperature, and that's why there's zero-emission of gases and effluents from our plant," Dhruvendra Kumar Tyagi, ACE Green's general manager, told Reuters about the firm's replacement of the original smelting furnace.
Luminous Power Technologies, owned by France's Schneider Electric and among India's most significant auto battery manufacturers, provides ACE Green with more than 200 tonnes monthly of used batteries, which ACE said it becomes 120-130 tonnes of lead and sells back again to the firm.
Luminous did not react to a Reuters request for comment.
ACE Green has signed an agreement with Altus Asia Group in Singapore to license its technology to recycle 5,000 tonnes per year of used lead-acid batteries in the first half of 2022, with the potential to double that capacity in 2023, its Managing Director David Leong said.
The investment because of this plant will be $5 million which Leong expects to improve via private equity and private partners.
"(The technology) basically solves all of the problems of owning a traditional lead recycling smelter," said Leong, adding that the business plans to also setup plants in Malaysia, Vietnam and South Korea using this technology.
ACE Green says it has inked licensing and joint-venture deals to recycle 90,000 tonnes per year of used lead-acid batteries with four commercial recyclers in 11 countries, which would create a total around 55,800 tonnes each year of lead. Additionally it is planning for a 12,000 tonnes annually used lead-acid batteries recycling plant in Australia which would produce 7,440 tonnes annually of lead.
All of that would be equal to 1% of the world's recycled lead.
Other companies are developing similar processes.
Nasdaq-listed Aqua Metals, which uses water-based solvents at room temperature to recycle used batteries to produce lead, is not at first seeking to replace informal recycling or backyard smelting but is focusing on the regulated market where its product could be marketed as an environment friendly, bolt-on technology, Chief Executive Steve Cotton told Reuters.
He said he plans to commercialize the process and roll out licenses as soon as June this year.
Ola Hekselman of Imperial College London has been focusing on a proprietary solvents and chemical process to extract lead from batteries and has co-founded a company called Solveteq which aims to commercialize the technology in the next 18 to 24 months.
"Just being sustainable and green might not exactly be enough for all of us to convince others to change to the technology," Hekselman said.
Source: japantoday.com
