Noida-based “Attero” may have the right strategy!!
Today everyone is talking about the transition to clean and renewable energy to save our environment from complete collapse, challenging our well-being on mother earth. While the problem seems to have hit home, the solutions are not easy to implement. Since the time domains of availability of renewable energy sources (e.g. the Sun) and their utilization (e.g. evenings and nights) do not match, storage becomes the most critical issue. Also, to mitigate the man-made pollution primarily generated by transportation, we must get rid of the polluting fuels and jump to electric mobility. Here again mobile storage of electric energy is important. The front-runners in both these areas are the batteries, which are around for quite some time, for example the Lithium ion batteries in our pockets. However, with them being considered for transportation or even grid scale storage, the demand will now rise to huge proportions.
Where is all this Lithium going to come from? And, it is not only Lithium, but also the other elements (e.g. cobalt, nickel, graphite) in the batteries, whose supply chains need to be sustainable to realize our dreams of seamless E-mobility. Most of Lithium is mined in limited areas around Argentina, Bolivia etc. and can certainly not continue to supply in the enormously growing demand of the whole world. Cobalt is mined in Congo where there are several serious issues related to child labor. Clearly battery materials have to be recycled in a major way. In India the Noida-based company “Attero” has been in this space for some time; but has decided to give a big boost to its capacity by investing 300 crores, which will raise the recycling capacity from 1000 tons to 10000 tons (over 20% of the market size). They have plans to invest, play, and grow in the full e-waste sector including recovery of several important and precious materials components, thereby playing a major role in circular economy.
Please see the following news Source(s) and original reference(s) therein:
(The Economic Times, Dec. 24, 2021).
