During his pathway to the U.S. presidency, Joe Biden made many campaign promises, including spearheading the country’s comeback as a leader in clean energy. One of the biggest problems that the Biden administration faces is the fact that the country has fallen to a distant third place behind China and Europe when it comes to manufacturing lithium-ion batteries that are part-and-parcel to powering electric vehicles and power storage in green energies like solar and wind.
One way to try and make up some ground is implementation of more stringent regulations regarding recycling, particularly considering Statista estimates that just 20% of electronic waste in 2018 was documented, collected, recycled. That’s millions of lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries finding their way into landfills and incinerators instead of being reused in some fashion.
Today, when a battery at the end of its "first" life is removed, let’s say from a vehicle, it has three possible destinations: a recycling facility, a second-life application, or a waste management facility. Going into a waste stream, albeit a dump or some type of disposal facility with no recovery of any value, is obviously the least desirable process for many reasons, namely landfill footprint, pollution and flat-out waste.
At a recycling center, the valuable metals (lithium, cobalt, nickel, manganese, etc.) are recovered from battery cells for sale and subsequent re-used in another battery.
In a second-life application, the battery isn’t dismantled. Rather, some key components, such as software and power electronics, are replaced and the battery re-purposed. In December 2020, the European Commission released a proposal for the regulation of Li-ion batteries covering a range of standards encouraging second-life applications to create a sustainable process to keep up with surging EV demand.
This is better known as a "cradle-to-cradle" life cycle in a "circular economy" and savvy investors are getting in front of the opportunity.
Regardless of the destiny for the battery at the end of its first life, there is a common thread for risk of a fire. Li-ion batteries can be volatile, with the failure of one cell – either by defect or damage – starting a fire that hops to the next cell and then the next and so on, a process known as "thermal runaway."
Last year, The Verge covered the danger Li-ion batteries pose to recycling centers, specifically citing a massive fire at a Texas recycling facility in 2016 that rendered firefighters nearly helpless. Industry publication Waste 360 in May detailed an onslaught of 25 fire incidents in 21 days at waste and recycling facilities during April. The culprit: lithium-ion batteries.
When it comes to recycling and second-life applications, there is a company, KULR Technology Group, Inc. (OTCQB:KULR) that provides a proven way to tamp down the risk of Li-ion fires. The San Diego-based company’s passive propagation resistant (PPR) design is an integrated solution that provides total battery safety for battery transportation. The technology has been proven by various government testing authorities to stop or mitigate the impacts of battery failures during transportation of Li-ion batteries at any point in the life cycle, including end-of-life.
KULR is widely regarded as a foremost leader in Li-ion battery safety, with its technologies used by NASA for projects on the International Space Station and, most recently, the Perseverance Rover presently exploring Mars.
Lending further credence to the superiority of the tech, Americase, which dominates the market for shipping damaged or defective Li-ion batteries, last year partnered with KULR to gain access to the technology to further improve safety in its standard shipping processes.
Against the backdrop of increasing regulations supporting circular economies worldwide, MarketsandMarkets forecasts growth from $17.2 billion in 2020 to $23.2 billion in 2025 for the battery recycle market. Interestingly, investors tend to focus on highly competitive, volatile market segments for Li-ion batteries, such as the automakers and the miners. $23.2 billion is hardly a "niche" market; it is a sneaky quiet part of the market that can be owned by KULR, now that it is actively commercializing technology already popular with aerospace majors.
