Canada firm eyes lithium-ion battery from recycled materials

TORONTO (ICIS)–A Canadian energy storage and green energy firm plans to manufacture a lithium-ion battery using recycled materials, it confirmed on Tuesday.

Saint Jean Carbon, based in Oakville near Toronto, said that it and an unnamed partner firm would build “a high powered full scale lithium-ion battery with recycled/upcycling material from an electric car power pack and upcycled anode material from Saint Jean Carbon”.

The three-stage project, “a world first”, is expected to show that the life cycle of battery raw material can be reused over and over again, it said.

Recycling materials to build a high performance lithium-ion battery (HPL) would “greatly change the way we look at the raw material chain in energy storage applications and how the raw material will affect the cost of electric vehicles”, the company added.

Under the project, the partners will use proprietary and patented systems for dismantling and separating the chemistry and hard materials; they will design and re-engineer the surfacing of the raw materials; and, in a final stage, they will construct two identical cells, one with new material and one with upcycled materials, Saint Jean said.

The automotive industry is a major global consumer of petrochemicals which contributes more than a third of the raw material costs of an average vehicle. ICIS tracks the movement of petrochemical raw material costs in auto production both globally and regionally with the weighted ICIS Basket of Automotive Petrochemicals (IBAP).

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