A pioneering company recycles this waste in Costa Rica in search of a circular economy future. Phones, laptops, tablets, electric vehicles and solar receivers need lithium batteries to operate. The question is what to do with them when they run out and become garbage that takes 500 years to decompose.
A Costa Rican company works to install a battery recycling and end-of-life plant that plans to replicate its commitment with allies throughout the region.
Costa Rica, un país líder en la transición hacia la movilidad sostenible, inauguró el pasado 24 de noviembre la primera planta de reciclaje de baterías de litio en el país. La planta, propiedad de la empresa costarricense Fortech, tiene una capacidad de procesamiento de 1.000 toneladas de litio al año.
Lithium Battery recycling. FORTECH is a Costa Rican company leader in the sustainable transformation of waste into useful resources through high-tech industrial processes. They present themselves as an "urban mine" that seeks to extract critical metals in the waste sector and not through the exploitation of the soil, and as "the bridge between
Costa Rica, a country where open pit mining is banned, has become a leader in the extraction of heavy metals such as lithium — not from the Earth, but old batteries.
The Fortech recycling factory which opened nearly three decades ago in Cartago about 27 kilometers (17 miles) from the capital San Jose, is referred to by its staff as an “urban mine.”
For the last six years, it has focused on extracting lithium contained in rechargeable batteries used in everything from mobile phones and laptops to electric cars and solar panels.
Millions of batteries are discarded every year. While the battery casings take about 100 years to decompose, the often toxic heavy metals inside never do.
For Fortech, this presents a proverbial gold mine, and for our planet, perhaps a lifeboat. “We now know that waste does not exist. We know it is a resource that can be used again,” said Fortech managing director Guillermo Pereira.
“It''s important to break paradigms,” added the 54-year-old, who with his son Francisco, 25, created a new method for extracting metals from used batteries.
“The world needs a circular economy” that recycles precious primary materials rather than sourcing new ones, said Pereira.
Unlike lithium mined elsewhere in conditions often harmful to the environment, workers and local populations, Fortech’s metals are taken from 1,500 tons of used batteries discarded every year in Costa Rica alone, according to his son, the company’s project manager.
They are collected in malls, electronics stores or electric vehicle sales points.
Lithium, dubbed “white gold” or the “oil of the 21st century,” has seen its price explode on the global market from $5,700 per ton in November 2020 to 60,500 dollars in September 2022 due to electric cars replacing their polluting, gas-guzzling forerunners.
But lithium production plants consume millions of liters of water and can be harmful to the environment. Obtaining lithium from recycling batteries expels only a quarter of the planet-warming CO2 that comes with mining it, according to Fortech chemist Henry Prado.
Recycling also saves the planet of the environment pollution caused by the “usual disposal method” of lithium batteries, which is often simply to dump them, he added.
According to the American Chemical Society, as little as five percent of the world''s lithium-ion batteries are thought to be recycled.
At Fortech, collected spent batteries are placed on a conveyor belt that feeds them into a crusher. The waste extracted in this way is then transformed into a mix of cobalt, nickel, manganese and lithium known as “black mass.”
These metals comprise about 57 percent of each battery — the rest is copper, aluminum, plastic and iron, all of which can also be recycled.
Fortech does not have the technology to further separate the individual metals in the “black mass,” which it sells instead to factories in Europe to complete the process and manufacture new batteries.
According to the German development agency GIZ, Fortech has turned Costa Rica into “a pioneer in Latin America in the valorization of used lithium batteries.”
Fortech is a Costa Rican company that is dedicated to providing adequate treatment to batteries once their useful life cycle is over through the technology for the extraction of critical metals that they developed.
"We are in the midst of a paradigm shift and industrializing the closing of the useful life of batteries with the technical separation of the components without producing emissions in the process," says Guillermo Pereira.
And he comments: "We are talking about an electromechanical process with recovery through biochemistry. Our factory does the inverse of the machines that produce the equipment in the assemblers: we separate the materials and obtain the base materials such as plastic, copper, aluminum, lithium, cobalt and nickel".
About 95% of all materials are recovered with this dynamic and 5% are used during the procedure. Meanwhile, the final products are exported to European and Asian markets dedicated to the manufacture of batteries in the case of metallic oxides rich in cobalt and lithium. The remainder is for multiple uses in industry, one of the most coveted is copper.
Currently, the Fortech project, the winning proposal of Mobility Talks, the first Latin American electric mobility contest, is in the permitting phase for the installation of the approximately 2,500 square meter plant in Costa Rica with a view to opening in November of this year.
In parallel, a battery collection campaign is being carried out in conjunction with GIZ. Today approximately 80 to 100 tons per year are received from the electronics that will be used to start up the factory. The goal is to have the plant ready and experienced by the time the batteries of the first electric vehicles to enter circulation need to be treated.
"With a German university we will absorb technology to manipulate the batteries of electric vehicles that we will receive in the coming years, in addition to acting correctly in the discharge of the same, the technical disarmament and diagnosis", indicates Pereira.
Following this line of work, a deactivation process was created at the site where the waste is generated; therefore, pre-processed materials would be transported to the plant to reduce the risk.
In this regard, he anticipates that "the projection is regional and the intention is to seek partners in Latin American countries to develop modular systems so as not to centralize the solution in a single country."
However, it is not intended as a decision to take this year, but there are already advanced conversations with several companies in the electric mobility sector. "In 10 years we will have a shower of batteries for electric vehicles," says the CEO of Fortech.
Thinking about the possibility of a circular economy related to the national industry, he considers that "the production of batteries in the country is feasible" to avoid export, but not in the short term. In this regard, he assures: "I see it in about five years, we are already investigating the possibility of establishing battery assemblers."
Along these lines, he mentions a case in Argentina where a company dedicated to lead batteries began its transition and now manufactures lithium batteries, "with the paradox of having to buy from Asia the metal that was extracted from a regional salt mine".
Los cigarrillos electrónicos o “vapes” se han vuelto populares en los últimos años, especialmente en la población joven.Estos pueden contener nicotina, saborizantes y otras sustancias. La inhalación activa el dispositivo de calentamiento alimentado por batería de litio, que vaporiza el líquido en el cartucho o depósito.
Algunos fabricantes han optado por publicitarlos como dispositivos desechables, creando en el consumidor un pensamiento erróneo de que los mismos se pueden botar a la basura convencional.
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