Attero Recycling Pvt, India's largest lithium-ion battery recycling company, plans to invest $1 billion in the next five years to build lithium-ion battery recycling plants in Europe, the United States and Indonesia, according to foreign media reports.
Attero Recycling Pvt, India's largest lithium-ion battery recycling company, plans to invest $1 billion over the next five years to build lithium-ion battery recycling plants in Europe, the United States and Indonesia, according to foreign media reports. With the global transition to electric vehicles, the demand for lithium resources has surged.
Nitin Gupta, CEO and co-founder of Attero, said in an interview, "Lithium-ion batteries are becoming ubiquitous, and there is a huge amount of lithium-ion battery waste available for us to recycle today. By 2030, there will be 2.5 million tons of lithium-ion batteries at the end of their life, and only 700,000 tons of battery waste is currently available for recycling."
Recycling used batteries is critical to the supply of lithium materials, and the shortage of lithium is threatening the global shift to clean energy through electric vehicles. The price of batteries, which account for about 50 percent of the cost of electric vehicles, is rising sharply as lithium supplies fail to meet demand. Higher battery costs could make electric vehicles unaffordable for consumers in mainstream markets or value-conscious markets such as India. Currently, India is already lagging behind major countries such as China in its electrification transition.
With a $1 billion investment, Attero hopes to recycle more than 300,000 tons of lithium-ion battery waste annually by 2027, Gupta said. The company will start operations at a plant in Poland in the fourth quarter of 2022, while a plant in the U.S. state of Ohio is expected to begin operations in the third quarter of 2023 and a plant in Indonesia will be operational in the first quarter of 2024.
Attero's customers in India include Hyundai, Tata Motors and Maruti Suzuki, among others. Gupta revealed that Attero recycles all types of used lithium-ion batteries, extracting key metals such as cobalt, nickel, lithium, graphite and manganese from them, and then exports them to super battery plants outside India. The expansion will help Attero meet more than 15 percent of its global demand for cobalt, lithium, graphite and nickel.
Extracting these metals, rather than from used batteries, can be environmentally and socially damaging, Gupta notes, noting that it takes 500,000 gallons of water to extract one ton of lithium.
Post time: Jun-14-2022