US DOE

The Department of Energy (DoE) marked ‘National Battery Day’ in the US with the launch of the country’s first lithium-ion battery recycling centre.

The ‘ReCell Center’ has been set up at the Argonne National Laboratory to “help the United States grow a globally competitive recycling industry and reduce [its] reliance on foreign sources of battery materials”, the DoE said.

Lithium-ion batteries in the US are currently collected and recycled at a rate of less than 5%. The DoE aims to eventually “profitably capture 90% of all lithium based battery technologies”, and subsequently “recover 90% of the key materials” from lithium batteries.

The US Department of Energy (DoE) has launched a Lithium-ion Battery Recycling Prize and an associated Battery Recycling R&D Centre, in a bid to reduce “America’s dependence on foreign sources of critical (battery) materials”.

The recycling prize will make awards totalling US$5.5 million to encourage innovation from American entrepreneurs in the fields of collecting, storing, and transporting discarded lithium-ion batteries for eventual recycling.

In addition, the US will invest $15m to establish the recycling centre “focused on cost-effective recycling processes to recover lithium battery materials”. The centre is to be led by Argonne National Laboratory, with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.