Li-Cycle featured in a Financial Times article focused on electric vehicle battery recycling

Original article published in Financial Times

Porsche’s planned fully electric vehicle, the Mission E   (Source: Clean Technica/Porsche)

“Rise of electric cars poses battery recycling challenge”

Li-Cycle has been quoted in a second article in the Financial Times – this piece is specifically focused on the recycling challenges posed by electric vehicle lithium-ion batteries. Direct quotes from Li-Cycle are bolded in the excerpts provided below.

“As electric cars roll towards the motoring mainstream, companies are gearing up to address one big environmental question: what to do with the lithium-ion batteries used to power them once they run out?
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The batteries used in electric cars are much bigger, last eight to 10 years, and will account for 90 percent of the lithium-ion battery market by 2025, Roskill forecasts, increasing lithium demand fourfold and more than doubling demand for cobalt — two of their essential elements. The price of cobalt has already risen by more than 80 percent this year.
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Canadian recycling start-up Li-Cycle says to make [lithium-ion battery recycling] profitable you need to recycle all of the battery materials. It claims it can recycle all types of lithium-ion batteries recovering [greater than] 90 per cent of materials including lithium, cobalt, copper, and graphite.

“You get the full economic value . . . that’s what will enable it to be profitable,” said Ajay Kochhar, the company’s chief executive and co-founder. “You need to look at it [in terms of] all the other valuable components contained to really understand what is going to enable this market.”

Mr. Kochhar estimates over 11m tonnes of spent lithium-ion batteries will be discarded by 2030. The company is looking to process 5,000 tonnes a year to start with and eventually 250,000 tonnes — a similar amount to a processing plant for mined lithium, he said.“