Metastable commissions material processing facility near Bengaluru

Urban mining startup Metastable Materials on Thursday announced commissioning of a 1,500 tonne-capacity material processing facility near Bengaluru.

The new facility will help the startup to scale up its existing capabilities within the battery recycling and urban mining domain.

The Bengaluru-based startup is focused on extracting all materials from end-of-life Lithium-ion batteries.

With the new facility, the company is now looking to actively ramp up its production capabilities to enable it to achieve an optimal capacity of processing 5 tonnes of raw materials per day during the next few quarters, it said in a statement.

In a year’s time, Metastable’s new unit will be capable of handling up to 1,500 tonnes of material processing at its full operational capacity.

The commissioning of the unit will act as a catalyst in the scaling and commercialisation of the company’s ‘Integrated Carbothermal Reduction’ process, Shubham Vishvakarma, Founder and Chief of Process Engineering of Metastable Materials, said.

Spread over 21,000 sq ft of space, the facility, the company claimed, will be the first and only facility in the world, to deploy a chemical-free Integrated Carbothermal Reduction (ICR) process for battery recycling that extracts materials out of lithium-ion batteries.

In the near future, the unit will also be doubling down as an on-site R&D centre to enable breakthrough improvements in terms of yield and in the overall process efficiency, the company said.

Metastable said its long-term mission is to not focus on just closing the recycling loop, but also bridge the gap between the supply and demand of rare metals like cobalt, nickel and lithium.

The company also said it has already received interest from several key players in the market for both supply of end-of-life batteries for processing and the purchase of the extracted materials out of them.