Costa Rica, a nation the place open pit mining is banned, has turn out to be a leader in the extraction of large metals these as lithium — not from the Earth, but previous batteries.
The Fortech recycling manufacturing unit which opened nearly 3 a long time ago in Cartago about 27 kilometers (17 miles) from the cash San Jose, is referred to by its staff members as an “urban mine.”
For the final six several years, it has centered on extracting lithium contained in rechargeable batteries used in all the things from cellular telephones and laptops to electric powered autos and photo voltaic panels.
Millions of batteries are discarded each year. Even though the battery casings consider about 100 a long time to decompose, the generally harmful heavy metals inside by no means do.
For Fortech, this offers a proverbial gold mine, and for our earth, maybe a lifeboat. “We now know that squander does not exist. We know it is a resource that can be employed again,” mentioned Fortech taking care of director Guillermo Pereira.
“It’s important to break paradigms,” extra the 54-12 months-aged, who with his son Francisco, 25, established a new technique for extracting metals from utilized batteries.
“The globe requirements a circular economy” that recycles precious most important components fairly than sourcing new kinds, stated Pereira.
White gold
Compared with lithium mined elsewhere in circumstances often dangerous to the setting, workers and neighborhood populations, Fortech’s metals are taken from 1,500 tons of utilized batteries discarded each and every year in Costa Rica by yourself, in accordance to his son, the company’s project manager.
They are gathered in malls, electronics retailers or electrical car profits factors.
Lithium, dubbed “white gold” or the “oil of the 21st century,” has observed its price explode on the world-wide marketplace from $5,700 for each ton in November 2020 to 60,500 pounds in September 2022 thanks to electric vehicles changing their polluting, fuel-guzzling forerunners.
But lithium manufacturing crops take in thousands and thousands of liters of water and can be harmful to the setting. Acquiring lithium from recycling batteries expels only a quarter of the world-warming CO2 that arrives with mining it, according to Fortech chemist Henry Prado.
Recycling also will save the earth of the surroundings air pollution triggered by the “usual disposal method” of lithium batteries, which is generally just to dump them, he extra.
According to the American Chemical Culture, as very little as five percent of the world’s lithium-ion batteries are considered to be recycled.
Pioneer
At Fortech, gathered invested batteries are put on a conveyor belt that feeds them into a crusher. The squander extracted in this way is then reworked into a combine of cobalt, nickel, manganese and lithium recognized as “black mass.”
These metals comprise about 57 % of just about every battery — the relaxation is copper, aluminum, plastic and iron, all of which can also be recycled.
Fortech does not have the engineering to further more different the unique metals in the “black mass,” which it sells as a substitute to factories in Europe to total the method and manufacture new batteries.
According to the German improvement company GIZ, Fortech has turned Costa Rica into “a pioneer in Latin The us in the valorization of utilized lithium batteries.”
