Argonne’s ReCell Center hosts Industry Collaboration Meeting, highlighting battery recycling partnerships
Argonne’s ReCell Center recently hosted a two-day meeting to spark partnerships in the battery recycling community
image: Attendees gather at the ReCell Industry Collaboration Meeting.
Credit: (Image by Argonne National Laboratory.)
Battery recycling could be key to America’s economic and technological competitiveness and national security.
Imagine if you could take an electric vehicle battery at the end of its life, dismantle it and recycle it into a brand new battery, cheaply and easily. That’s the dream of the ReCell Center at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory.
The ReCell Center is a national collaboration of industry, academia and national laboratories led by Argonne and funded by DOE’s Vehicle Technologies Office. The center hosted its annual Industry Collaboration Meeting in late summer. The goal of the meeting was to bring industry representatives together to provide feedback and insights on ReCell’s mission, operation and achievements, helping to introduce various forms of battery recycling into the commercial mainstream.
“A lot of what we do is help industry succeed. When industry succeeds, we succeed.” — Jeff Spangenberger, ReCell Center director
“One of the main things we want to do is get stakeholder buy-in on what we’re doing,” said ReCell Director Jeff Spangenberger. “We want to show folks what we’re working on, and get their thoughts on if we’re on the right path or if they have recommendations for where we should go next.”
The goal of the conference, Spangenberger said, was to get industry representatives talking to one another to solve mutual battery recycling challenges. “We want to get people to talk and mix together to make new collaborations. This meeting is about helping to make new connections because no single person or group is going to know how to make battery recycling infrastructure the best it can be,” he said.
ReCell has been able to form a number of industry collaborations already. One of those is a shared DOE grant with the American Battery Technology Company (ABTC), a battery recycling company based out of Reno, Nevada.
Ryan Melsert, the CEO of ABTC, expressed enthusiasm and appreciation for the conference. “Coming here and meeting more people in the industry gives us an opportunity to be collaborative, share new ideas and progress the state of the art in the industry,” he said.
Also in attendance was Argonne materials scientist Jessica Durham Macholz. She has worked on a team that developed a direct recycling process that yields high recovery rates of usable cathode materials. It just won a 2024 R&D 100 award, known as the “Oscars of Innovation,” to recognize new commercial products or processes for their technological significance.
“Our process uses equipment that is readily available in recycling industries to separate and sort battery components,” Durham Macholz said. “By recovering the cathode material directly, we can generate up to 17 times more profit compared to pyrometallurgy and six times more profit than hydrometallurgy. Compared to these conventional recycling techniques, direct recycling also reduces environmental impact, nearly halving greenhouse gas emissions.”
“Direct recycling is something that not many companies are working on now, but there are great benefits to it,” Spangenberger added. “That is why we’re tackling the challenges associated with it.”
The larger focus of the ReCell Center and of the meeting is to enable industry to meet its goals, Spangenberger said. “A lot of what we do is help industry succeed. When industry succeeds, we succeed.”
In addition to direct recycling, the ReCell Center has a significant and related research focus area: advanced resource recovery. This entails getting valuable battery materials easily and quickly from end-of-life batteries.
A third focus area of ReCell is to better design batteries so that they are able to be more easily recycled. “The goal is to really design batteries with their end-of-life state in mind,” Spangenberger said. “We want to look at how you can better dismantle a battery and still be able to get some bang for your buck with it.”
The guest keynote speaker was David Howell, vice president of Strategic Marketing Innovations (SMI), a technology commercialization firm. He pointed to the potential of battery recycling to alleviate pressing challenges in materials. “We would have to potentially extract up to 10 million tons of raw materials a year to meet the goal of having 50% electric vehicles on the road,” he said. “If we could recycle effectively, we could drop that requirement by about 90% to a level much more achievable.”
Argonne National Laboratory seeks solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology by conducting leading-edge basic and applied research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit https://energy.gov/science.