In June last year, the company announced it would set up a recycling joint venture, GMBI, with Toyota Tsusho Corp., a Toyota Group company, in North Carolina. The venture will have a maximum annual processing capacity of 13,500 tons, enough to handle used EV batteries and scrap equivalent to more than 40,000 vehicles a year.
The new joint venture will be a pretreatment plant specializing in safely dismantling and shredding end-of-life batteries and manufacturing-process scrap to produce “black mass.” The black mass will then go through separate post-processing to be refined into key minerals such as lithium, cobalt and nickel for use in battery production.
In April last year, LG Energy Solution also announced a battery recycling joint venture with Derichebourg, France’s top metal recycler, in the Val-d’Oise region, with annual capacity of 20,000 tons. The company said the move is intended to respond proactively to European regulations and help build a sustainable battery ecosystem.
For reuse, LG Energy Solution said it has installed and is operating an EV-charging energy storage system using repurposed batteries at Ochang Energy Plant 1. It is also building know-how through efforts including a North America reuse ESS business and development of reuse ESS systems for UPS and backup power applications.
Separately, the company said it is working to achieve “zero waste to landfill” across all its sites. It said its Nanjing plant in China received UL’s top Platinum rating after being recognized for a 100% resource-circulation rate.
An LG Energy Solution official said the company will “take the lead in realizing a sustainable future and customer value by building a circular system for battery resources.”
* This article has been translated by AI.
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