Bengaluru-based Metastable Materials has announced the commissioning of an urban mining unit located on the outskirts of Bengaluru, Karnataka, in a bid to scale up its existing capabilities within the battery recycling/urban mining domain and thus fuel strategic business growth for the startup.
The Unit comes with quality control and material handling capabilities in order to facilitate and manage ‘waste-as-ore’ concept-based recycling of hazardous end-of-life batteries and products.
Metastable’s new unit, spread over an area of 21,000 sq.ft., will deploy a chemical-free integrated carbothermal reduction (ICR) process for battery recycling that extracts valuable materials out of lithium-ion batteries.
The facility is equipped with an in-house quality control lab with the capability to constantly ensure the quality of output materials. In the near future, the unit will also be doubling down as an on-site R&D center to enable breakthrough improvements in terms of yield, purity, and in overall process efficiency.
Metastable Materials is now looking to actively ramp up the production capabilities of the new unit to enable it to achieve its optimal capacity of processing 5 tonnes of raw materials (through urban mining) per day during the course of the next few quarters.
Metastable’s new unit will be capable of handling up to 1500 tonnes, in a year which is designed to produce zero-effluents and completely eliminate fire hazards that are usually associated with recycling lithium-ion batteries.
Shubham Vishvakarma, Founder & Chief of Process Engineering, Metastable Materials said, “The new unit will be pivotal in establishing Metastable as a company that offers a sustainable end-to-end one-stop solution for managing end-of-life lithium-ion batteries. This unit would work as a training ground for the extended Metastable team to gain much-needed experience and practical exposure to the recycling of LiBs. This unit shall also enable Metastable Materials to be equipped well enough with the market experience to extend its services across the globe.”
Metastable’s long-term mission is to not focus on just closing the recycling loop, but rather bridge the gap between the supply and demand of rare metals like cobalt, nickel and lithium.
With the extraction of metals from dead LiBs based on its flagship ICR process that is designed in India, Metastable is providing a sustainable alternative to freshly mined metals and attempting to integrate them with the existing industrial supply chains; the extracted metals are as good as new ones and can be used to create anything from wires to drugs to jet engines, and of course, new batteries.
Metastable’s process inherently reduces capital requirements and provides industry-standard efficiency with minimal inputs required.
Metastable Materials has already received interest from several key players in the market for both supplies of end-of-life batteries for processing and the purchase of the extracted materials out of them.
