NEW DELHI : India's largest electronics recycling firm Attero Recycling will spend $1 billion in the next five years and add plants in Poland, Ohio and Indonesia starting this year, its CEO told Reuters, aiming to tap into a global boom for electric vehicles.
Attero's goal is to raise its annual lithium-ion battery waste processing capacity to 300,000 tonnes by 2027 from 11,000 tonnes now, he said, meeting 15 per cent of the world's demand for lithium, cobalt and graphite, from less than 0.1 per cent today. By recycling such batteries, Gupta said they were not only solving a waste problem but also becoming"significant players in the material supply chain by selling green metals without mining the earth".
Attero's extraction rate is about 98 per cent and it uses chemical methods instead of the more expensive smelting process that melts certain metals beyond recovery, Gupta said. Some of the materials it extracts go to Tesla Inc via Swiss mining group Glencore Plc.