Recycling

The batteries powering the energy transition contain critical minerals — lithium, cobalt, nickel, manganese — that are energy-intensive to mine, geopolitically concentrated, and increasingly in demand.

Yet when those batteries reach the end of their life, most recycling processes either burn off the value through energy-intensive smelting or recover it through acid-based hydrometallurgy that generates large volumes of sodium sulfate waste — trading one problem for another.

Renewable Metals takes a different approach. Founded by Australian metallurgists with decades of experience extracting battery metals from ore bodies, the company draws on Australia's distinctive tradition of alkali-based metallurgy — developed for nickel and cobalt refining and largely absent in the rest of the world — to recover critical minerals through a world-first alkali recycling process.

The result recovers almost all the lithium, nickel, cobalt, copper and manganese from end-of-life batteries, works across all major chemistries including LFP, requires no pre-processing to black mass, and produces none of the chemical by-products that plague acid-based alternatives. Recycling is the lowest-carbon source of critical minerals — and Renewable Metals is building the process that makes it commercially viable.