With the explosively growth of battery usage from consumer electronics to electric vehicles, and large scale on/off-grid renewable energy storage, a large quantity of spent batteries that once powered those devices has been generated and will accelerate within the next decade and beyond. To avoid tons of spent batteries ending up in landfills, which would be hazardous wastes and could cause severe environmental pollution, we developed a highly cost-effective and energy-efficient technology “Hydro-to-Cathode” to recover the precious elements (Li, Ni, Mn, Co, etc.) from the spent batteries and make them into new cathode materials and batteries to power new devices.

Without extracting and separating the elements in the leached solution like the traditional hydrometallurgy approach does, Ascend Elements starts directly with the impurity-removed and adjusted solution to make high quality precursor for cathode materials. By controlling the conditions of precursor reactions and sintering process, we can make cathode materials with a wide range of particle sizes (2~16 µm), single crystal/polycrystalline, porous or dense intraparticle structure, and different compositions, including LiNi_1/3Mn_1/3Co_1/3O₂ (NMC 111), LiNi_0.5Mn_0.3Co_0.2O₂ (NMC 532), LiNi_0.6Mn_0.2Co_0.2O₂ (NMC 622), LiNi_0.8Mn_0.1Co_0.1O₂ (NMC 811), LiNi_0.83Mn_0.06Co_0.11O₂ (Ni 83), and LiCoO₂ (LCO). The recycled cathode materials show as good as, or even better performance than cathode materials made from newly mined salts. Our unique Hydro-to-Cathode^TM process significantly reduces the steps and costs to recover and recycle cathode materials from spent batteries.