Lead Engineer at Altilium Clean Technology
Dr. Jake Entwistleholds a Ph.D. in battery materials, specializing in high-capacity anodes and composite materials for lithium and sodium-ion batteries. Experienced in scaling lab innovations to production, he currently leads a UK pilot plant using hydrometallurgical recycling to upcycle Black Mass into active battery materials.
This Transcript is AI-Generated
Jake Entwistle: Our recycling process end to end is well above 90% efficient. And so if you can push that to never a hundred percent, but 99%, ultimately, there's no reason why these materials can't be indefinitely recycled.
Micah: More than one in five cars sold around the world in 2024 were electric. That's a big shift and it raises an equally big question. What happens to all the minerals, chemicals, and materials inside those electric vehicle batteries? Once they reach the end of the road?
Chai: The answer could be more than just recycling.
We might be on the edge of a new phase one where EV battery recycling doesn't just close the loop, but helps power a local circular economy.
Jake Entwistle: I think it's the most exciting prospect is the fact that these minerals, they're not available here in the uk. They're nickel and the COBAL in particular. So it's the fact that we can generate a resource locally that didn't ultimately
Micah: come from the earth.
In this episode, we're exploring a pilot project that's breaking new ground in ev battery recycling. We'll unpack how the process works, explore the potential for a local circular economy, and look at the EU regulations driving this change.
Chai: I'm Chai Nussbaumer.
Micah: And I'm Micah Schweitzer. This is Balancing the Future from METTLER TOLEDO.
Chai: On this show, we delve into the world of science and technology and explore its transformative impact on our lives
Jake Entwistle: as a company. We don't actually shred batteries right now. We have plans to do so, but there's already a global market for these shredded up batteries, black mass.
Micah: That's the voice of Jake Entwistle Entwistle. He's the lead engineer at Telium Clean Technology and one of the mines behind a pilot plant in the UK that recycles EV batteries.
We'll get into that in just a moment,
Chai: but first, a quick definition. Black mass is the powdery material left behind when batteries are shredded and broken down, and it's the starting point for recovering valuable battery ingredients.
Jake Entwistle: There are third parties in the uk, all around Europe, around the world who shred up the batteries.
And you can sort of think of them of in vans, advanced scrap yards if you would. So they're recycling the rest of the car. They want to neutralize the battery component, so they shred it up into this black mass we call it, and it is just black powder. And we kind of ship that around the UK or around the world currently to
Micah: be recycled.
And how much black mass volume comes out of a single shredded battery typically.
Jake Entwistle: I would say from a sort of mid range vehicle, around 300 kgs of black mass, they tend to strip out a lot of the steel components from the battery pack. And then you're just hopefully shredding as many of the cell components as possible.
And it contains a variety of chemicals and impurities at that point, but it also contains the valuable minerals, so cobalt, nickel, manganese, lithium, and the graphite as well is valuable to us. And then even the impurities there, metals such as copper. So it's still very valuable to be recycled.
Chai: So what percentage of a battery can be recycled?
Does it depend on the battery type or since we were just discussing EVs, is there a certain percentage that is a recommendation or an aim?
Jake Entwistle: We aim to recycle more than 90% of the black mass components. Well over 90% actually. But I wouldn't wanna pin my name to a, a specific number above that. Yeah. So once it gets shredded into that black mass, the vast majority of that is then recycled into various streams, particularly the valuable metals.
There's still some metals in there such as aluminum. Iron, which are lower down the value chain compared with these expensive metals such as nickel, so they can ultimately also be recycled. But at the moment we call that impurity removal.
Chai: So you just mentioned nickel. Why are lithium, cobalt, nickel, graphite, and other metals so important to recycle and recover?
Jake Entwistle: There's multiple angles to look at this. The first one is, at the moment there are 10 from primary sources, so it has to be mined from a mineral in the ground with all the ESG sort of ramifications of opening new heavy metal mines.
Processing those minerals takes a lot of energy, and then they get further processed into battery grade metals. So whether that's nickel or cobol, there's also. Scrutiny around the jurisdictions where these metals originate from. It's not in the uk, that's for sure. And that then also ties into, once the battery in an EV comes into a country like the uk, there are no active nickel and cobalt mines here.
So we have this resource, which has been shredded up, and the options are for us to hopefully recycle that and then we, we actually have a resource of these metals in the UK as opposed to opening new mines.
Chai: And so with these current methods for recycling, how are they resource intensive? Can you give some examples of what these methods are?
Jake Entwistle: So beyond the shredding of the batteries, typically what we do is we dissolve that black mass in acidic solutions. The basic operations are similar to how you would process some mineral components of the supply chain. So we, we dissolve in acid and then we go through various impurity, removal steps. We remove the graphite and then we remove the other metals, as we were saying that we call impurities or copper, uh, iron aluminum and some others.
We're then left with leach solutions. So acidic solutions that contain the payable metals. So cobalt, nickel, manganese. Lithium that then moves through our plant here, and that can be recovered in various forms from a lower grade, uh, product called MHP, which is mixed hydroxide precursor. So you can then precipitate the manganese nickel and cobalt together, and there is a market for that.
That goes to then further refineries to make battery grade materials. Or what you can do here at our pilot plant is we go into a process known as solvent extraction, where we selectively remove each of those metals from solution. We remove the manganese into a, a stream of pure manganese, pure cobble.
After that, then nickel and they're then separated into their. Pure metal solutions. What we're left with then is lithium in solution, and we also have a pilot here at our Act two facility where we recover the lithium into a technical grade and eventually a battery grade lithium salt as well. So that's typically how the flow progresses.
And then what we sort of touched on earlier is. We're taking in a technology that is maybe 10 plus years old where they had lower amounts of nickel back then and other technological advancements over those 10 years. And we use those streams to produce the current generation of NMC, which lasts longer, charges quicker.
Uh, it's safer. Various improvements that have been developed.
Micah: Yeah, I suppose that's worth mentioning that battery composition has been evolving for quite some time now.
Jake Entwistle: Absolutely, and it will continue to evolve. So NMC is the focus of what we're recycling right now, but there is LFP, which is gaining in prominence, so we can also recycle that.
But the economics of that looks slightly different.
Chai: LFP or lithium iron phosphate batteries don't contain as many valuable metals, so there's less financial incentive to recycle them. But the upside, the chemistry behind recycling LFPs is much simpler, especially during what's called the wet stage.
That's the part of the process where the battery materials are dissolved and liquid, so individual elements can be separated out.
Micah: Now with NMC or nickel, manganese cobalt batteries, most of the valuable metals can be recovered. However, with LFPs, that's not the case, and that makes recycling them a bigger challenge.
Right now, LFP recycling is still in its early days and worth keeping an eye on. Back in season one, we spoke with Simon Taylor, one of our colleagues here at Mettler Toledo, and an expert in emerging battery technologies. Here's a short clip of him sharing what's ahead for battery tech.
Simon: In terms of chemistries, there's an awful lot going on.
So every region, most every startup company, every customer we're talking to is investigating some new type of battery chemistry. And that could be a way to take the, the classic NMC chemistries, make them better or develop. Completely new chemistries. So lithium, sulfur batteries are on the horizon, right?
So sulfur is produced everywhere. You can dig it out of the ground, you can take it from a volcano, you can take it from a lot of manufacturing processes as a byproduct and get very pure amounts of sulfur. So they're cheap, they're very reliable. They have a very high energy density. So they're typically.
50% higher than a typical NMC battery.
Chai: We've talked to Jake Entwistle a lot about the process, but what about the plant itself?
Jake Entwistle: Yeah, so what this plant is piloting is all those operations that we just went through. So from the leech in all the impurity removal, and then the solvent extraction. We have performed those at a lab scale, actually just a bit beyond lab scale.
So we have our Act one facility, which is a testing lab and mini pilot capabilities. And what we're building here in Plymouth and Devon is our Act two facility. And that is at a larger scale. So effectively what we're building here can recycle around one EV per day. It's kind of much further along than the lab scale experiments.
And what it allows you to do is test your principles on industry relevant equipment. And performing more complex testing that you need to generate larger volumes of solutions for. That's the sort of focus here, is developing the flow sheet that we will ultimately commercialize at a full scale recycling plant that will recycle hundreds of EV batteries per day, is sort of gaining the insight that we need to develop those plans at this facility.
So
Micah: if I'm hearing you right, the pilot is about developing this at a much bigger scale than currently can be used for recycling EV batteries.
Jake Entwistle: What's new about it for us as well is it does allow you to sort of demonstrate the commercialization of some of the materials that we're generating so you can make tons scale quantities, which you can.
Sell or get off tech agreements for which you can't do really at the lab scale, so you can demonstrate to potential investors. As we grow now to a a large commercial facility, we can demonstrate how valuable are these materials that we have produced from
Micah: recycled dvs. A pilot plant inherently is about proving a concept.
So what are the technical or operational challenges that you're working on overcoming?
Jake Entwistle: I think some of the challenges that we're trying to test for here is predicting what an average black mass blend will look like towards the end of the decade. So you can predict what cards are on the road today, what cars are going to be produced over the next half a decade, and then the material that we recycle is a mixture of end of life batteries from EVs and other applications.
So. Electronic devices, and not just end of life EVs, but EVs that have been in write-offs or floods or however a car may be written off, those EVs also have to be recycled. So you have to then predict for the UK, for example, what does that average blend look like?
Micah: So it's very much about the local or regional car market to a certain degree.
Jake Entwistle: Definitely it is strongly linked to that. Yeah, we have some strong partnerships with Jaar Lamb Rover in the uk and Nissan, who have a, a large battery gigafactory in the northeast of the UK and Jaguar Lamb rover have aspirations to produce their own battery cells here in the southwest of England. And, and as part of that, these factories also produce quite a lot of production scrap.
So their production scrap also feeds into our recycling process. So that's another stream of recyclable material. But as the chemistry develop. And are still developing the sort of blend that we'll ultimately end up recycling is affected by all of these streams.
Chai: Yeah. And so safety must be a huge concern when dealing with use batteries.
What are the main risk and how does your plant manage these risks?
Jake Entwistle: These heavy metals are highly toxic, so it's also sort of part of our mission to take these materials and recycle them responsibly in a way where they're not released to the environment. That also ties back to how would you safely dispose of this material as opposed to recycling it.
That's not very clear how that can be done, so we can take the material. Into our site here and ultimately into our commercial facility, and recycle it in a way where it enters back into the market. It doesn't end up in a landfill or in another waste stream. What we have to be so very careful about is when we're transporting these batteries around the UK that is done safely when we're shredding them and moving the black mass around, that's done in a way where it cannot egress into the environment.
And then when we're unloading that. Into our plant. These powder materials are highly hazardous, so we have a lot of, uh, abatement here, specifically around containing those chemical hazards.
Micah: So how is black mass packaged and transported? It's usually stored in big, heavy duty bags. Think of those tough construction bags used to haul sand or gravel.
These are lined with polyethylene sealed on both ends, and often even shrink wrapped to keep everything secure during transport.
Chai: Once the bags are emptied, they're considered contaminated waste. Most of the leftover material can be washed out, but some trace elements stick around. Some bags, especially ones with spouted tops or bottoms can be reused depending on the design.
But disposal is still a major part of responsible handling.
Micah: Why are we telling you this? Because recycling isn't just about the batteries themselves. Even the packaging materials become part of the equation. And to compete with mining virgin materials, you need to be thinking about every stage of the recycling process
and how competitive is recycling with obtaining virgin materials.
Jake Entwistle: Yeah, so we have some studies that have been performed by third parties. We've shown that the energy intensity of recycling is more than 20% lower than mining virgin materials. So there's a huge energy cost saving there. And then we've not gone so much into the regulation that's driving behind this.
We can perhaps touch on that. Further, but there is now a drive for recycled content in new EVs. Towards the end of this decade, there's actually a, a legal mandate for that, for selling EVs in the eu. So not only is the energy cost saving on recycling these batteries versus virgin mining, there's also potential premiums because these materials are now written into loss.
So new batteries from 2031 will have to have minimum contents of recycled materials.
Chai: So you mentioned some of the main steps in the process already, but how does your technology differ from traditional battery recycling methods?
Jake Entwistle: Yeah, so on that it, it is quite a competitive environment globally for recycling lithium-ion batteries.
There are a number of flow sheets and different approaches to doing that. Extracting the metals at different stages, treating the black mass differently. I would say that. What was perhaps more incumbent is a method known as PY methodological recycling, where you ultimately combust the battery materials.
And in that method you can't recover a lot of the elements, especially the graphite, that soft gets burned and the efficiency of the recovery is a lot less than 90%. It's more around 50%. And again, that's now been written into this legislation where the materials that are going to be recycled, these minimum recycled contents, they have to be recycled.
Up to a certain efficiency. So that almost rules out certain recycling methods so that your process for recycling the EV batteries has to be 90% or more efficient for you to then qualify as this recycled content.
Chai: Yeah, the combustion method sounds really fun and uh, interesting to conduct, but as you said, since it's a much lower percentage of recovery, yeah.
Maybe not the, the way forward. So how does your process compare to mining new materials in terms of the carbon footprint and what are use and waste? Can you speak a little bit about that?
Jake Entwistle: Yeah, so it's partly tied into that study on the, the 20% reduction in CO2 emissions for our material versus virgin mine material.
However, what I just mentioned that I think I said was that's a urg method, which is where you combust the material. Our recycling method generally is termed hydrometallurgical, where you dissolve the material in acid and recover all these constituents. That's still very much well established. So hydro metallurgical methods are used.
Gigantic scale in mining operations. A large part of this CO2 and energy saving is that our feedstock is so much higher purity than what can be dug out of the ground. Many multiples in terms of metal content, and the fact that we don't necessarily have to move that around the world. We have that here in the UK ready to be recycled, reducing the carbon mileage on the material.
Micah: You touched on regulation a bit earlier, but I wanna talk a bit more about that in in detail. How are incoming global regulations for minimum recycled content in new batteries shaping recycling strategies?
Jake Entwistle: Yeah, so it is certainly a tailwind for us. The EU legislation doesn't come into effect until 2031, but the sort of timescale that it takes to implement changes into a a battery product, especially for an ev, means that this is very much work that's being carried out today.
So it's, we have to produce relative quantities. Of these recycled materials, they have to go into testing programs and these testing programs for new EV batteries can run into many years. Actually, we have to make those recycled materials now work with automotive partners like as I mentioned, Jaguar, alarm Rover and Nissan for ourselves, and test those batteries now over the next 12 months, 18 months, two years, so that we can define the product that will come to market by 2031 to meet the regulation.
Micah: From what you're saying, it sounds like the work today is very much future focused. You're working today essentially for say, 2030 or 2031. On the side of battery manufacturers. Are they starting to think about how to design the batteries they make with recyclability in mind?
Jake Entwistle: Definitely. Yeah. So I think that's one thing that you would notice now, or we would notice is if you take a vehicle that is 10 plus years old, it can be more difficult to make it recyclable.
So typically now, yeah, it is also legislated to make the batteries when you. Build them from scratch so that at their end of life they can be recycled more easily. And I know as part of that, there's now this battery passport, which follows a battery around from when it is made up until when it's recycled.
And that also contains all the information that's needed to recycle this battery wherever it may end up.
Chai: Let's pause for a moment and bring Simon back to break down the EU battery passport and explain how it fits into the bigger picture.
Simon: They've also tried to say, okay, we need to transform some of these, what we would call opaque supply chains into more transparent supply chains.
So this is going in the direction of ethical mining. It's making sure that we as consumers of batteries, we as people who buy electric vehicles. Can scan a QR code on our car and find out exactly where those minerals were mined or recycled. And now there are many other countries that are now looking at this legislation and saying, okay, how do we adapt that the Chinese governments are looking at this battery passport?
I think the US and Canada are now looking at some form of legislation and it helps everyone. It helps us as consumers make better choices. It helps us uncover some of those supply chains that are hidden to us or. And not really obvious where our materials and where our products come from.
Micah: Yeah. I know that's a significant issue with, for instance, plastics recycling is knowing exactly what's in a given plastic bottle or whatever your recycling is, the composition of the battery. Can you recycle multiple. Different batteries together and form a batch of black mass out of them, or do they have to go through their own recycling streams?
Jake Entwistle: Yeah. Typically for all lithium ion batteries, our approach would be to recycle 'em together so that the battery chemistry that's in your phone and laptop is different to what's in an ev, but in a roundabout way, it contains these heavy metals, and so it's kind of just predicting what that blend looks like at a commercial scale.
So how much of it is coming from electronic device waste? How much is coming from. EV waste. And what are the chemistries within those EVs? Certain OEMs use completely different chemistries within their battery to others. Again, that's kind of what this pilot facility will do. We're trying to find the boundary conditions to what are the chemical limits to certain constituents within the black mass that we can economically recycle,
Chai: and what kind of design changes actually make recycling easier?
Jake Entwistle: At the pack level, that kind of comes down to making the pack so that they can be disassembled more easily. And so components that we don't necessarily want to feed into our hydrometallurgical process can be physically removed from the battery. So they tend to have casings and modules on the casings made out of steel or aluminum if they can physically be separated.
Before the battery gets shredded, then the sort of metal content in terms of nickel and cobble lithium is then boosted. So there's less of those components going into the shredder. Uh, less steel, less plastic components, so they, they can be physically removed if it's designed into the battery pack at an early enough stage.
Chai: And is it expensive to recycle?
Jake Entwistle: It does kind of depend. I know I've disposed of personal lithion batteries, just a central location, say at a supermarket where you just drop your old devices in there and they get sent off to a shredder ultimately and may end up with ourselves. And then there are then other questions around ownership of a battery in an EV when it becomes to its end of life.
In some cases it's owned by the vehicle owner in most cases. But in the future that might not be the case. It may be that the. Original manufacturer has an obligation or does have an obligation to recycle that battery when it ends up at a recycling yard or a scrap yard facility, and so certainly they have to put some costs into making sure that that material does get responsibly recycled.
But I think it kind of comes back to the fact that. As it's forming a battery, even if it's at the very end of its life, it can't be used for any other application. It needs to be shredded and turned into black mass, then, um, it is very much still valuable. It contains a lot of valuable minerals within the black mass.
So although it may be. Expensive of various stages. It has an intrinsic value based on the minerals that are in there. It's very much people want black mass to make black mass.
Micah: You mentioned circularity earlier. In theory, circularity is almost like a perpetual motion machine. I mean, there's nothing new coming in. It's a perfect circle, but. Obviously there has to be some degree of new material coming in and some degree of waste going out. As a question of, of how tight we can make this flow of recycled material into do products, how circular can the battery manufacturing sector become, do you think?
Jake Entwistle: I think. I would be pretty optimistic on this. I think, as I mentioned, our recycling process end to end is well above 90% efficient, and so if you can push that to never a hundred percent, but 99%, ultimately, there's no reason why these materials can't be indefinitely recycled. I think sort of looking forward by 2031, there's this regulation for 6% recycled lithium, 6% recycled nickel, and 16% recycled cobol.
That's legally mandated. By 2036, that becomes 12% lithium, 15% nickel, 26% cobalt. And then I think maybe we see further graduations from there, but that's now looking out 10 years maybe beyond that, those slower limits just keep increasing.
Chai: This battery focused policy is part of the broader European Green deal.
A bold, wide reaching plan to reshape the eus environmental future. At its core, the green Deal has three major goals. Make Europe the first climate neutral continent by 2050. Cut greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55% by 2030, and plant 3 billion trees by the end of this decade.
Micah: One key piece of the puzzle.
Building a circular economy and battery recycling plays a major role, but to make this happen, Europe needs a lot more recycling, plants and infrastructure on the ground.
Chai: Right now the challenge is scale. Europe's current recycling capacity is 10 times lower than what's needed. In the next five years, more than 30 material recovery projects have been announced or are underway, but nearly half are on hold or in limbo due to high energy costs, limited technical expertise and gaps in funding,
Micah: there's clear momentum, but we'll need more pilot plants like this one to hit those targets.
So beyond building out more recycling capacity, what else does Jake Entwistle see coming down the line for this field?
Jake Entwistle: There's very much challenges of today as well, but the nature of how long it takes to qualify these battery components, which. Critical safety components of a vehicle and in the automotive space, this just takes a very long time to qualify new components at a safety critical in any vehicle. So yeah, we have to look forward based on that.
Also, based on meeting these targets that have been set into law and then looking forward in terms of generating these mineral resources more locally. So. By the end of this decade going out beyond that, how available are these minerals going to be? What's the global market going to look like? If we can onshore more of their production from a resource that's already here, that's surely a better position to be in.
Chai: And can we anticipate that there will be an industry standard for recycling? Is anyone setting a best practice example of whether it be a, a company, country?
Jake Entwistle: Yeah. In terms of, uh, industry standard, that's still very much to be determined. Telium is a big player in recycling. There are many, not just startups, but big established companies recycling black mass.
And so time will tell not only who has the best process, but who can move most effectively. And so come out on top. I.
Chai: So just to wrap up our conversation, we always have a question about advice. So what advice would you give to young scientists and engineers who are interested in battery recycling or in new battery technology in general?
Jake Entwistle: I would sort of look at the team that we have here as a recycling company. In terms of educational level. We have geologists, chemists, physicists, mechanical engineers, even civil engineers, chemical process engineers. So there's sort of a space in battery recycling for any, any type of, or a wide variety of technical degrees per se.
I would just say you can learn as much as you can from the publicly available information. But we've tried to foster solve internships for even high school level students, degree level students. We have some working here on there sort years or months away from university, and I think getting hands-on experience is very valuable.
So to anyone who's. Aspiring to go into this. If you can reach out to battery recyclers and manage to get some actual experience there, that's invaluable.
Micah: We've been speaking with Jake Entwistle Entwistle, he's lead engineer at at Tillium Clean Technology. So Kai, what were some of your key takeaways from this conversation?
Chai: It was really insightful to hear Jake Entwistle break down all of the stages of the battery recycling process. As the battery technology advances, there's also a need to adapt and, and change how they are recycled.
It's so nice to know that major companies such as Nissan, land Rover, and Jaguar are starting to engage on this topic.
Micah: And what's interesting to me is the idea that battery recycling and then. Battery manufacturing or remanufacturing becomes a, a local or a regional enterprise and you think of batteries as, you know, the raw materials coming from mines far away in this very globalized process.
And so the idea of this sort of local collaboration between the people who need batteries and the people who are recycling and manufacturing batteries for that use is really interesting to me as we. Talk so much about circular economies and the need to localize production and the need to move away from virgin resources and reuse what we already have in the system.
Chai: Yeah, so this definitely plays into the near term EU targets that we already mentioned. Those are theoretically achievable. But of course we still need to scale up a number of recycling plants in order to get there.
This has been Balancing the Future from METTLER TOLEDO.
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