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Cirba Solutions will invest $300M in a fully integrated battery recycling plant in Richland County in South Carolina in the US. The plant will be able to produce battery materials for more than 500,000 electric vehicles per year, corresponding to more than 150,000 tonnes cell equivalent waste materials. Groundbreaking will take place during 2023, with operations expected to begin in late 2024.
The facility in South Carolina will process all both end-of-life batteries from EVs and scrap from battery manufacturing and will include both pre-processing and material recovery. The company has previously announced partnerships with the startup Momentum Technology, which provides a membrane-based extraction technology and the material startup 6K which uses microwave plasma technology to re-engineer cathode materials.
With the South Carolina expansion Cirba Solutions will have a processing capacity which annually can produce battery materials for 750,000 EVs, equivalent to more than 215,000 tonnes cell equivalent material, if the US average in 2022 is used. For reference that is about 43% more than what was placed on the US light EV market in 2021. In December Redwood Materials announced it would build a "battery material campus" Ridgefield also in South Carolina which will have a output capacity of 100 GWh. Using the same calculation this equals 1.5M light EVs or 431,000 tonnes of cell equivalent materials. Redwood has stated that they won't be able to feed this entirely with recycled materials which makes a lot of sense.
Read Cirba Solutions statement here.