A big facility for recycling lithium-ion batteries is now operating in Central Ohio, where workers are busy salvaging and repurposing the metals and minerals needed to drive the clean energy transition. Cirba Solutions officially opened its expanded battery recycling plant in Lancaster — making it the first project of any kind to come online after receiving funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which passed in 2021. Cirba Solutions snagged more than $82 million in total federal grants to help scale its operation and meet the nation’s rising demand for key battery ingredients.
The $400 million expansion project includes two new processing lines that can together produce 15,000 tons annually of “black mass” from batteries — a cakey, powdery substance rich with materials such as lithium, nickel, cobalt, and manganese. Another wing of the recycling complex is slated to be operational by 2026. At full scale, the Ohio recycling plant will be able to churn out enough battery-grade metal salts to power 250,000 new electric vehicle batteries every year, the company claims.
“A lot of our energy and transportation needs are already, and increasingly going forward, going to have batteries at the core — they’re in cars, they enable us to integrate renewables into the grid,” said Giulia Siccardo, director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains, or MESC. “We have an opportunity now through this energy transition … to move from a system that is linear and extractive to something that is circular and much more sustainable.”…