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Industry Leader in Sustainable Critical Battery Metals
Creator of Sustainable Closed-Loop Battery Recycling.
Battery recycling is a huge part of the sustainable energy future and one of the most promising ways to provide consistent access to high-quality materials used to make batteries.
Recycling batteries offers a few key benefits:
- It maximizes the value of the battery since recycling is cheaper than building a new battery.
- Limits the carbon footprint of battery production by reclaiming critical elements for reuse.
- Improves the safety of waste disposal sites by removing more batteries from the waste disposal cycle, preventing fires and explosions from mishandled batteries.
Because even a drained non-chargeable battery can be dangerous if it’s mishandled or damaged. When it comes to lithium-ion battery recycling, one of the most important components is the cathode and cathode materials.
Put simply, a cathode is a metallic electrode that carries current in a polarized electrical device. They aren’t unique to batteries, but they are a critical part of functional batteries. Energy flows out of a cathode, and in through an anode.
The cathode in a lithium-ion battery is the most expensive part of the battery. They’re manufactured crystals that contain lithium and other elements, most commonly cobalt.
The big challenge with these elements is that complete recovery of the elements is difficult, can be energy intensive, and isn’t possible with standard recycling techniques. However, innovations in lithium-ion battery recycling are getting us closer and closer to the 100% reclaimed elements goal.
Innovations like the ones we use here at Cirba Solutions provide a consistent supply of the critical elements in these batteries.
What Is a Cathode?
There are a few key reasons why getting as much of the elements used in a lithium-ion battery back is important:
- The elements in these batteries are comparatively rare and expensive. Being able to reclaim and reuse those elements makes scarcity less of a problem and makes larger-scale sustainable energy backed by lithium-ion batteries much more possible.
- Additionally, extracting cobalt and lithium and other elements is costly, dangerous, inconsistent, and comes with a huge carbon footprint. Some of those problems are just the nature of mining for rare materials, but it’s also because the biggest concentrations of these elements on Earth are located in politically and socially unstable locations.
Cirba Solutions, transforming the way we use our finite resources.
Recycling todays batteries to make tomorrows.