Nth Cycle, the Boston-based maker of a recycling technology that extracts critical metals from batteries, e-waste, low-grade ore and mine tailings, has secured $3.2 million in funding from investors led by Clean Energy Ventures, also based in Boston.
Nth Cycle uses what it describes as an environmentally friendly process called electro-extraction to recover cobalt and other minerals from discarded batteries and mining ores and waste using electricity and carbon filters. The company says electro-extraction is a cleaner, lower-cost alternative to conventional pyrometallurgy and hydrometallurgy processes used by battery recyclers and mining companies to recover cobalt, nickel and manganese for battery manufacturing.
“As demand for batteries increases dramatically in the coming decades, we need a sustainable process for recycling and reusing critical minerals to build a secure, low-cost domestic supply chain for electric vehicles and energy storage that avoids imports from unreliable and politically unstable regions,” says Daniel Goldman, managing director at Clean Energy Ventures. “Nth Cycle’s best-in-class technology reduces the volume of e-waste headed for landfills, improves the effectiveness of existing mines and can ultimately have a material impact on climate change by mitigating over 2.5 billion tons of CO2 emissions over the next thirty years through cleaner processing and re-use of critical minerals.”
Nth Cycle, which developed its technology at Harvard University and Yale University, recently opened new operations in the Boston area and will use the funding to execute its technology road map and deploy several pilot projects with recyclers and mine operators early next year, according to a news release issued by the company and Clean Energy Ventures. The company says battery recyclers, operators of existing and proposed mines, automotive original equipment manufacturers, micromobility companies and battery manufacturers are interested in the technology to reduce reliance on imported critical metals or environmentally unfriendly recovery technologies.
“Separating critical minerals from other metals in the recycling and mining process can be costly and complex,” says Daniel Miller, Innovation Crossroads program lead at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. “A technology like Nth Cycle’s reduces the cost, footprint and environmental impact of producing recycled metals that have exactly the same composition and performance as newly mined minerals.”
“A significant fraction of the critical minerals needed for the transition to electric vehicles are already in circulation today, we just haven’t had a clean, profitable way of retrieving them, until now,” says Megan O’Connor, CEO and founder of Nth Cycle. “Through electro-extraction, we’re turning waste into valuable resources and we look forward to bringing this technology to battery recyclers and miners so we can all move together on a path toward a more sustainable planet.”
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