Impact Solutions are delighted to be one of four winners of The Ecosurety Exploration Fund, which was launched in November 2019 to provide a visible funding route to work on projects addressing environmental challenges.
Impact’s project, CellMine, is helping to close the loop on the lithium-ion battery lifecycle.
Sales of lithium-ion batteries are projected to grow to $1tn by 2024, largely driven by governments driving legislation on electric vehicles. However, current supplies of rare earth materials used in their manufacture are inadequate to meet our long-term needs and existing recycling technologies are inefficient and environmentally hazardous.
The Ecosurety Exploration Fund will support Impact Solutions to advance the CellMine project by enabling a new low-energy, low-cost recycling process to be explored. The process can be used to selectively recover rare earth metals used in lithium-ion batteries (such as lithium, cobalt, and manganese) in an environmentally friendly way, thereby helping to close the loop on the lithium-ion battery lifecycle.
Tom Rose, Innovation Director at Impact Solutions commented “Lithium-ion battery technology is the keystone in moving our society to a greener more sustainable future. But to make good on this promise we need to develop effective and economical ways to recycle these batteries at end-of-life and make sure the precious, limited resources used within them are not lost.”
“CellMine hopes to tackle this challenge by developing a recovery method for these metals allowing them to be reused in new batteries again and again. This funding will be instrumental in allowing Impact to demonstrate the principles needed to take this technology from the benchtop to future commercialisation.”
Find out more about the CellMine project.
Impact is very excited to receive this funding and thank Ecosurety for the support. We hope to create an impact within the transition of moving towards a circular economy.
You can read the full press release here.
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