Global recycling company opens facility to recover precious metals from batteries

Southeast Asia’s first battery recycling facility opens in Singapore to recycle lithium batteries and recover precious metals, E-waste recycling company, TES, claims.

Known as TES B, the plant has the daily capacity to recycle up to 14 tonnes or the equivalent of 280,000 lithium-ion smartphone batteries.

The facility uses a combination of mechanic equipment and hydrometallurgical processes to recover precious metals such as nickel, lithium, and cobalt, and is partially powered by a 1MwH second-life energy storage system (ESS) that is fed by 350KwH of rooftop solar panels.

TES’s proprietary battery recycling technology closes the loop on the take-make-dispose model widely used in lithium battery manufacturing and disposal chains. The recovery rate of precious metals exceeds 90% and yields a purity level of almost 99%.

Thus, the metals TES recovers from lithium batteries are commercially ready for fresh battery production. The plant achieves this by using of shredders and separation equipment that convert the batteries into black mass, followed by a chemical treatment process that extracts precious metals including lithium and cobalt.