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The future of electric vehicles depends not just on making better batteries — but on reusing the ones we’ve already built. That’s where RecycLiCo and Kemetco Research come in. During a recent tour of their demonstration facility in Vancouver, Munro & Associates explored how this partnership is quietly revolutionizing lithium battery recycling. The keyword here is efficiency — fewer steps, fewer chemicals, and results that outperform even virgin materials.
The Rise of Lithium Battery Recycling: A Historical Catalyst
RecycLiCo didn’t start as a battery company. It originated from American Manganese, a mining-focused firm that held patents for extracting manganese from low-grade ore. Then, around 2015, Norman Chow — hydrometallurgist and president of Kemetco — made a key observation. He noticed that the chemistry used to recover manganese also worked on lithium-ion cathodes, particularly those containing cobalt and manganese. This insight opened the door to a new application.
A lightbulb went off. Adapting that process to extract valuable metals from spent EV batteries would change everything. It could close the loop on battery production. That shift would turn waste into raw material and drive a more sustainable supply chain. Chow wrote a white paper, secured funding, and the team began initial lab testing. Everything worked — and RecycLiCo was born.
The Problem with “Black Mass” Recycling
Today, most EV battery recycling efforts — especially in North America and Europe — focus on producing “black mass.” This is the shredded mix of cathode and anode materials left after battery packs are mechanically dismantled. It contains lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese, and graphite.
Recycling black mass into battery-grade material often gets outsourced to Asia. There, facilities follow complex, multi-step processes to extract individual compounds — like nickel sulfate, cobalt sulfate, and lithium carbonate. After extraction, they recombine these materials into precursors for cathode active materials. This roundabout approach adds time, cost, and waste.
RecycLiCo’s question: why bother with all those extra steps?
RecycLiCo’s Game-Changing Approach
RecycLiCo skips the middlemen. Their process takes black mass or battery production scrap and converts it directly into high-grade lithium hydroxide and precursor cathode active materials (pCAM), such as NMC 811 — all in a compact, scalable facility.
Here’s how it works:
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Stage 1: Pre-leach separation – For production scrap, active material is separated from aluminum foil before leaching. Black mass skips this step.
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Stage 2: Leaching – A high-efficiency, four-tank cascade leaching system extracts the metals into a solution. The system, originally designed for 500 kg/day, has been pushed to 800 kg/day throughput.
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Stage 3: Impurity removal – Lithium is separated from base metals (nickel, manganese, cobalt) to create a purified solution.
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Stage 4: Co-precipitation – Instead of isolating individual metal sulfates, RecycLiCo directly produces pCAM — reducing chemical use, energy input, and cost.
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Stage 5: Electrochemical salt-splitting – Lithium sulfate is split into lithium hydroxide and sulfuric acid, allowing in-house reagent recycling.
The output? Ready-to-use battery-grade materials that can outperform virgin equivalents in cell performance testing.
What Makes RecycLiCo Different?
1. Fewer Steps, Higher Value
Traditional hydrometallurgical recyclers go through multiple solvent extraction and crystallization stages to separate metals. RecycLiCo avoids this redundancy. Their direct-to-precursor process not only cuts time and cost — it yields a more valuable product.
2. Closed-Loop Chemistry
By regenerating key reagents like sulfuric acid and lithium hydroxide, the process minimizes waste and environmental impact. This also sidesteps one of the industry’s growing concerns: sodium sulfate overproduction.
3. Performance Beyond Virgin Materials
In trials with battery manufacturers, RecycLiCo’s materials have equaled or outperformed virgin inputs in electrochemical tests. That’s a huge milestone — proof that recycled doesn’t mean second-rate.
4. Customizable for the Evolving Battery Market
EV chemistries evolve rapidly, but RecycLiCo’s process is adaptable. Whether the need is for NMC 622, NMC 811, or high-nickel 9X variants, they can adjust metal ratios during precipitation to match OEM requirements.
Equipment and Expertise: Not Off-the-Shelf
What makes this facility tick isn’t just clever chemistry — it’s the equipment. The precision reactors, precipitation tanks, and custom-built leach systems are all tailored for high-performance, low-footprint operation.
The reactors used to produce pCAM must maintain exact temperatures and pH levels to form perfectly spherical particles with controlled size distribution — often between 8–12 microns. Few facilities in North America, if any, can match this level of process control.
These aren’t machines you buy from a catalog. Much of the equipment is custom-assembled or adapted in-house by experts like VP Joey Jung and the Kemetco team. This in-house engineering mirrors the early Ford Motor Company’s philosophy — owning your tools means owning your future.
Why This Matters for Gigafactories
As automakers race to build battery gigafactories across North America and Europe, they face a core dilemma: chemistries change. What’s standard today could be obsolete by the time a new facility opens.
RecycLiCo’s recycling model offers a solution. By colocating a recycling unit alongside a gigafactory, manufacturers can turn their own production scrap into battery-grade materials in real-time — reducing reliance on Asia and insulating themselves from supply shocks.
Moreover, since the machinery used for coating, electrolyte injection, and cell assembly remains largely unchanged regardless of chemistry, a flexible recycling backend like RecycLiCo’s keeps everything flowing, even as materials evolve.
Safety and Scalability
Safety is a major concern. Lithium-ion batteries pose fire risks. RecycLiCo tackles this head-on. Before processing, they remove all organic components from the black mass. Upstream, they fully discharge or heat-treat the materials. These steps eliminate flammable residues and reduce hazards.
And while today’s demo plant processes ~500–800 kg/day, the team is already scaling up. Their goal is to move from pilot to commercial scale via joint ventures — bringing this elegant process to OEMs directly.
North American Innovation with Global Reach
There’s a quiet pride in the Vancouver roots of this technology. Not only was the first commercial lithium-ion battery born here in the 1980s, but local institutions like the University of British Columbia continue to drive metallurgical innovation.
Jeff Dahn — one of the original graduate students behind early battery research — is now a globally respected figure at Dalhousie. The connection between Canadian R&D and global battery advances runs deep, and RecycLiCo sits squarely within that legacy.
Final Takeaways
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Battery scrap and black mass are the primary feedstocks for RecycLiCo’s process.
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Direct-to-precursor chemistry means fewer steps, less waste, and higher margins.
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Reagent recycling like lithium hydroxide and sulfuric acid generation sets them apart.
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EV-ready outputs like NMC precursors and battery-grade lithium hydroxide can re-enter the supply chain immediately.
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Scalable, adaptable, and sustainable, RecycLiCo’s process supports gigafactories and circular economy goals alike.
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