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The South Korean battery recycling company Sungeel Hitech will open a pre-processing plant in Stephens County in Georgia, United States. The company will invest more than $37 million in the new facility and employ 104 people. Operations are expected to begin in early 2024.
Sungeel Hitech, which went public in July this year has historically been processing a large part of North American batteries which have been processed at the company's plants in South Korea. In 2018 the company announced it would build a smaller pre-processing plant in Endicott, New York through a joint venture with Metallica Corporation. The plans stopped after protests against the location in a residential area.
The new facility will be located at the Hayestone Brady Business Park, a Georgia Ready for Accelerated Development (GRAD) Certified site, in Toccoa. The GRAD Program is a proactive effort by Georgia’s economic development community to develop a portfolio of available sites ready for fast-track development.
Georgia is becoming one of most important states for production of batteries in the United States with two plants owned and operated by SK On, a company Sungeel is working with in Hungary and South Korea. SK On has already a contract to sell production scrap to Ascend Elements which also is establishing a recycling plant in the state.
For Sungeel Hitech the establishment means the company soon has operations in X countries. Besides in the US the company operates or are building plants in India, Malaysia, China, Hungary, Poland, Germany and South Korea. The company is working with all three Korean large battery makers. Of these Samsung, through its subsidiary Samsung C&T is also a shareholder in the company.
Read State of Georgia's statement here.