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Hyundai & Lithion Partner for EV Battery RecyclingHyundai & Lithion Partner for EV Battery Recycling

Quebec’s Lithion Technologies will collect, recycle, and extract strategic materials from EV batteries for Hyundai Auto Canada.

Ray Chalmers

October 15, 2024

3 Min Read
Dismantling an EV battery at Lithion.
Dismantling an EV battery at Lithion. The company is partnering with Hyundai for collecting and recycling EV batteries across Canada.Lithion Technologies

At The Battery Show North America, Montreal-based strategic minerals supplier and battery recycler Lithion Technologies announced a multi-year agreement with Hyundai Auto Canada making it the primary and official partner for collecting, recycling, and extracting strategic materials from EV batteries. This news furthers an initial 2021 agreement between the two companies aimed at validating Lithion’s extraction tech that recovers 98 percent of the minerals contained in batteries.

Yves Noël, Lithion vice president and chief business development officer, told Battery Technology this was a long-developing and ongoing strategy between two visionary companies to establish and expedite recycling and putting more recycled materials into the EV battery supply chain. “Such an energy transition will not happen without recycling,” he says. ”Today we are extremely proud to count Hyundai, a global leader in the automotive industry, among our customers. This partnership paves the way forward globally and here in Canada, by reaffirming Lithion’s critical role in the battery manufacturing value chain.”

Collective commitment

More than 250 Hyundai and Genesis dealers across Canada will be participating in the collection and recycling effort. They simply contact Lithion when they have a vehicle with a battery at the end of its life cycle. Lithion then has the battery delivered to its recently inaugurated recycling plant in greater Montreal’s Saint-Bruno-de-Montarville. This arrangement emphasizes Lithion’s overall expertise in battery management, including battery handling and logistics, in addition to shredding and material extraction. “This collaboration reinforces our collective commitment to reducing the ecological footprint of electric vehicles, as battery recycling is one more step toward the circularity of battery materials for a sustainable energy transition,” Lithion stated in a press release.

Related:Closed-Loop Systems: BMW, SK tes, & the Future of Sustainable Battery Recycling

USA on the way

Lithion celebrated the opening of its Saint Bruno facility this past June. The company says this facility is the first of many to be built to make Lithion’s vision of enabling the entire world to be powered by the greenest batteries available a reality. The opening of a storage facility based in the USA will soon follow, the company says, and discussions are underway between Lithion and business partners to deploy plants like Lithion Saint-Bruno in that country. Thanks to its expertise in transborder transportation and logistics, Lithion will supply its plants from that storage location while providing its partners a turnkey service, solving for them a complex and costly facet of lithium-ion battery recycling. A similar strategy is in action in Europe.

Related:How XRF and Raman Technologies Enhance Lithium-Ion Battery Recycling

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Shortly after commissioning the Saint Bruno facility, Lithion Technologies was also very pleased to reveal the company had been selected for a hydroelectric connection by the government of Quebec, making the company a green energy user. This further strengthens its vision of a circular supply chain for batteries on the North American continent.

To create the circularity of battery materials, Lithion has developed a two-step recycling process with an environmental impact significantly smaller than mining. The first step, performed at Lithion Saint-Bruno, is the extraction of the critical minerals concentrate, or black mass, from batteries and non-conforming products from their production. Black mass is made of lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese, and graphite.

The second step is a hydrometallurgy process to separate and purify the black mass to produce strategic materials of the highest purity so they can be looped back into the production of new batteries.

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“What an exciting achievement to have completed the construction of our first commercial plant”, expressed Benoit Couture, Lithion president and CEO. “It’s a major milestone towards the realization of our dream of sustainably closing the loop of battery materials. And this is just the beginning. We will build more recycling plants, supplied by a network of battery collection and storage facilities, across Canada, the United States, and Europe to ensure the energy transition is a sustainable solution for the generations to come.”

Related:AI Battery Recycling Innovation: No Barcode Needed

About the Author

Ray Chalmers

Ray Chalmers is a Detroit-area-based freelance writer with an extensive background supplying technical features and news items on manufacturing, engineering, software, economics, and the myriad paths of knowledge representing human progress.

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