India’s largest electronic waste recycling company Attero Recycling on Monday announced that it will be investing INR 300 crore into lithium-ion recycling over the next nine months.
The funds will be utilised to ramp up the company’s lithium-ion battery recycling capacity by 11 times to 11,000 metric tonnes. Attero Recycling currently has a lithium-ion battery recycling capacity of 1,000 metric tonnes per annum.
Through this enhanced capacity, Attero Recycling envisions to capture 22% of the total potential market size in India by October 2022. India presently generates 50,000+ tonnes of lithium-ion battery waste every year.
Lithium-ion battery waste, in fact, is expected to grow by 40-80% year on year. Attero Recycling has partnered with various car makers and electronic companies for the collection of end of the life batteries and recycling them in a sustainable manner. This way, the company hopes to help India manage the growing Li-ion battery waste and transition from a linear to a circular economy, Attero Recycling said in a statement.
Notably, Attero Recycling recently partnered with MG Motors to reuse and recycle Li-ion batteries fitted in the brand’s ZS EV SUV. The company currently has 90% market share of automobiles and electronic OEMs.
Attero is already recycling all kinds of lithium-ion batteries ranging from a cell phone all the way to an electric bus with weights ranging from 30 gram to 780 kg to extract cobalt, lithium from lithium-ion batteries to ensure the completion of the circular economy value chain. The company claims to use avant-garde recycling technology that is NASA approved to extract pure gold, silver, copper, aluminium and palladium, which is then sold back to the market.
Attero Recycling is also in the process of increasing its e-waste capacity via franchise route. As a part of its futuristic roadmap, Attero is already in process of setting up plants to recycle e-waste at 14 other locations by the end of 2022. These plants will be strategically located across the country and will enable Attero Recycling to enhance its e-waste management capacity to 300,000 metric tonnes per year.
Nitin Gupta, CEO and Co-founder, Attero Recycling said almost 30% of the value for lithium-ion batteries comes from metals that make it and India does not have any reserves of cobalt or lithium. “By ensuring that the recycling infrastructure in the country can grow and meet India's current local demand, we want to make India ‘atmanirbhar’ in battery materials,” he said.