Lithium-Ion Battery Recycling Plant

ABTC’s lithium-ion battery recycling plant is located at the Tahoe Reno Industrial Center (TRIC) in Nevada. The 137,000 square foot recycling plant is designed to function with high yields and low emissions and will have the capacity to process an initial production scale of 20,000 MT of battery feedstock material per year.  

This plant enables the expansion of our in-house developed recycling technologies with application in a commercial-scale facility. A project led by a team of experts in their respective fields, the plant will be the first commercial demonstration of our closed-loop battery recycling process, separating and recovering critical materials from end-of-life batteries and purifying the products to meet battery-grade material specifications.  

Our ABTC team designed first-of-kind integrated battery recycling system based on a strategic de-manufacturing approach. Instead of utilizing brute force methods common today, where batteries are placed in high temperature furnaces (smelting), or in shredding or grinding systems, we’ve instead developed a ‘de-manufacturing’ process to extract metals and recover materials from spent batteries. Our recycling process utilizes an automated deconstruction process combined with a targeted hydrometallurgical, non-smelting process that deconstructs battery packs to modules, modules to cells, cells to subcell components, and then sorting and separating those subcell components in a strategic fashion. Because of our uniquely pioneered recycling process, we are able to realize greater net benefits than current conventional methods.

In our recycling process’ first demanufacturing phase, battery materials are recycled into products including copper, aluminum, steel, a lithium intermediate, and a black mass intermediate material. In our second hydrometallurgical selective leaching phase, the lithium intermediate is further refined into a battery grade lithium hydroxide product, and the black mass intermediate material is further refined into battery grade nickel, cobalt, manganese, and lithium hydroxide products.