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Li-Cycle is a Canadian company headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Li-Cycle is a cleantech company that uses a battery recycling technology to recover critical materials from both end-of-life lithium-ion batteries and battery manufacturing scrap. The process of breaking down these batteries and repurposing them is known as “urban mining”.

History
Li-Cycle was founded by Ajay Kochhar and Tim Johnston in 2016 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Since its inception, Li-Cycle’s goal has been to recover critical battery materials – such as lithium, cobalt, and nickel – from within spent lithium-ion batteries in a safe, environmentally friendly, and economically sustainable manner. Li-Cycle’s battery recovery technologies and scalable solution helps to address the supply challenges ahead for lithium-ion batteries.

Technology
Li-Cycle has a “Spoke and Hub” battery recycling system. At the more numerous “Spoke” facilities, located across North America, waste from battery manufacturing and dead batteries is shredded while submerged in tanks of a proprietary fluid. What emerges is plastics, copper, and aluminum, and a black powder that is known as black mass. Li-Cycle then processes the black mass at its Hub facilities through a hydrometallurgical process to produce battery-grade materials. Up to 95 percent of battery materials are recovered in the process which are then used to produce new, clean lithium-ion batteries.

Li-Cycle’s first commercial Hub is under development in Rochester, New York and is expected to be a new source of battery materials in North America, including battery-grade lithium carbonate, nickel sulphate, and cobalt sulphate. The Rochester Hub is also expected to be the first source of recycled battery-grade lithium carbonate in North America.