Dave Young, head of research and development at Mint Innovation, working on the technology to extract critical metals from old EV batteries for recycling to new batteries. Photo: Sharon Brettkelly
A Kiwi tech firm's breakthrough solution for recycling EV batteries goes offshore, where countries are scrambling to keep hold of their valuable e-waste metals.
Every year New Zealanders throw out 100 million kilos of old phones, laptops and batteries, which end up in landfill or are shipped overseas to recycling businesses that make money from our e-waste.
While we are exporting it, countries like the United States are ploughing billions of dollars into keeping e-waste onshore, because of the growing value of critical metals contained in it.
The e-recycling industry is set to explode as the tidal wave of old lithium-ion batteries from electric vehicles floods markets in the next 10 years and Kiwi company Mint Innovation is poised to take a lead role.
In July, the Auckland-based company signed a highly-publicised deal with the British car maker Jaguar Land Rover to use Mint's technology to recover critical metals such as lithium, nickel and cobalt from old batteries. The $18 million collaboration with the University of Warwick and LiBatt Recycling includes UK government funding.
But while Mint is leading the way in clean, cheap technology to harvest the precious metals for recycling into new batteries, New Zealand as a country risks being left behind in the process and paying the price, says chief executive and co-founder Will Barker.
"Typically these metals right now are being exported [from New Zealand] to northeast Asia and Europe and we're having to pay to get them back again. And in the future we may need to pay more to get them back again," Barker says.
He calls the US move to keep the metals onshore a "land grab" that other countries are closely following and says New Zealand needs to pay attention.
It is not Mint's first international foray. It has already developed special e-waste technology that is deployed to a plant in Sydney, and Texas is next.
It is also eyeing more markets for the EV battery formula in Europe and the US.
A table with the different kinds of lithium-ion batteries and the valuable critical metals that can be extracted by Mint’s groundbreaking technology. Photo: Sharon Brettkelly
Barker says the company is looking for the "low hanging fruit environments where this kind of technology is going to have the most frictionless market entry" and New Zealand is well down the list.
"We've got a really strong team of tech developers here and creating that team has taken us 10 years.
"Transferring that capability is really, really hard so what we do is develop the technologies where you can export the pots and pans piece, the tanks, the pipes, the pumps, the filter presses and of course you go to markets where you are going to resonate the highest, the loudest."
On Tuesday's episode,The Detail goes inside the lab at Mint and meets one of the brains behind the technology that will soon be part of the three-year EV battery recycling pilot with Jaguar Land Rover.
Its offices and lab in the Auckland industrial suburb of Mt Wellington hardly look like the place where world-leading technology is being developed.
But that is exactly what is happening in this non-descript building in a quiet dead-end street.
Head of research and development, Dave Young, says a lot of people around the world have been trying to develop the same kind of process but Mint is first to figure out how to extract the most sought-after materials like lithium in a clean way.
"It's not like the idea of recycling is new or unique to us. What a lot of people are out there doing is using existing infrastructure to recycle," Young says.
"What that looks like is big smelting plants that incinerate the batteries, [it] is very energy intensive and produces a lot of carbon emissions and is burning all the plastics and other things in the batteries which isn't good for the environment. But it does work and they don't need to spend much capital deploying a recycling facility."
But that process burns graphite, a valuable component of lithium-ion batteries, and the lithium cannot be recovered.
"The key selling points of the process that we have developed are that it's very green, it's got a very low carbon cost and maybe most important, it is very quick and operational."
Sue Coutts of Zero Waste Aotearoa says better policy and regulation on e-waste solutions are needed for New Zealand to catch up with other parts of the world, including Australia, and businesses like Mint need more support in developing their technologies to commercial scale here.
"At the moment we don't have anything coherent. There's quite a few people who are working to do little bits here and there," she says.
"And obviously some things like your cellphone or your laptop which has quite a high ratio of valuable parts to less valuable parts, there's more solutions for things like that than your toaster or your kids toys or batteries, there's a big gap there."
"When you look at EVs and all the things that are coming on stream I think we've got a lot of work to do to get things set up."
Coutts says all the answers are out there.
"All we have to do is put them into practice and that's the one thing we're not doing is we're not following the countries that we want to grow up to be like and we're really setting ourselves up to fail in the future."
Barker says New Zealand is not missing out yet.
"But it's that momentum of that land grab [which] is going to mean in 10 years' time we are going to be very far left behind and those metals are going to be prioritised for the countries that are recycling them."
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