ExplainerOctober 7, 2026
ABTC’s $100 million black-mass licence exposes the refining gap
Shredding concentrates battery material; it does not produce battery-grade minerals, and an export authorisation is not a sales result.
Topic
E Waste
Electronics, batteries and solar panels at end of life, and the recovery of what's inside them.
22 posts
TeardownOctober 1, 2026
India’s e-waste tax notice: paperwork is not a material balance
Reported allegations involving appliance companies reveal why invoices, recycling certificates and physical processing need separate verification.
TeardownSeptember 29, 2026
Seventeen towers recover caesium and rubidium — from ore waste, not batteries
The reported recoveries are impressive; feedstock, solvent balances and independently checked operating data determine their meaning.
Myth-BustingSeptember 23, 2026
Myth: if you drop off e-waste at a recycler, it gets recycled
A Basel Action Network investigation found eight of ten U.S. firms shipping e-waste to Southeast Asia held R2v3 'responsible recycling' certification. Here is where drop-off electronics can really end up.
ExplainerSeptember 22, 2026
Alberta bans solar panels from landfill: how panel recycling works, and who pays
From October 1, Alberta charges $14 on every new panel and bans end-of-life panels from landfill. Here is how a panel is taken apart, and why the fee is already contested.
TeardownSeptember 19, 2026
The "AI Will Create 40 to 60 Times More E-Waste" Claim, Examined
The Basel Action Network's projection is arithmetically defensible and widely misread. Most of the forecast tonnage is not servers.
ExplainerSeptember 14, 2026
The Sensor Under the Belt: How Magnetic Fingerprinting Finds a Hidden Battery
Litech mounts a flat sensor beneath an existing conveyor and reads magnetic signatures every millisecond, aiming to flag concealed lithium cells before they reach the shredder. The mechanism is elegant. The numbers are missing.
TeardownSeptember 11, 2026
R3 Lithium in Covington: A $15M Series A Moving Into a $150M Building
R3 Lithium is taking over battery recycling capacity in Covington, Georgia that Ascend Elements spent far more to build. The asset is real. The question is whether the funding matches what refining lithium to spec actually costs.
ExplainerSeptember 10, 2026
Bacteria Built a Molecule That Grabs Gallium. Now Comes the Hard Part.
Siderophores bind metals with extraordinary selectivity because bacteria evolved them to scavenge iron. Repurposing that chemistry for gallium and rare earths in e-waste is elegant, and the cost per gram is the whole question.
TeardownSeptember 8, 2026
"Plasma and lemon juice" recycles batteries — the headline is doing a lot of work
Rice University reports ~95% recovery of critical metals using citric acid. The chemistry is genuinely clever. The framing around it — the lemon, the 10% figure, the record — does not survive a close read.
TeardownSeptember 7, 2026
The EU Right to Repair Covers Less Than the Headlines Suggest
The directive is a real obligation with real teeth. It also applies to a short list of product categories, and the biggest driver of e-waste volume — cheap devices with glued-in batteries — largely sits outside it.
TeardownSeptember 6, 2026
tozero's Acid-Free Battery Recycling: Strong Chemistry, Small Numbers
A pilot plant recovering lithium without mineral acid is a genuine contribution. The gap between pilot tonnage and the volume of batteries reaching end of life this decade is three orders of magnitude.
ExplainerSeptember 6, 2026
Microwaves and Deep Eutectic Solvents: A Gentler Route to Battery Lithium
Conventional battery recycling dissolves cathodes in hot mineral acid. Microwave-assisted leaching in a deep eutectic solvent does the same job at lower temperature, in minutes, with a solvent you can in principle reuse.
ExplainerAugust 29, 2026
The molecular clamp that grabs gold when you flip a switch
A University of Illinois team redesigned the extraction molecule itself so the organic liquid conducts its own current. It pulled 89% of the gold out of real e-waste leachate — with one to two orders of magnitude fewer reagents.
TeardownAugust 26, 2026
Two "direct recycling" startups just got $150M from DOE
Nth Cycle took $100M and Princeton NuEnergy $50M out of the DOE's $500M battery round. Both have operating plants and third-party numbers — which is more than most. Neither has solved the part a grant cannot buy: feedstock.
ExplainerAugust 18, 2026
Can LFP batteries be recycled without dissolving them?
Iron-and-phosphate cathodes are cheap, which is exactly why conventional recycling struggles to pay for them. Direct regeneration takes a different route: repair the cathode powder instead of breaking it back down into salts.
ExplainerAugust 15, 2026
The battery-fire tripwire inside an MRF
CP Group's Sentry pairs X-ray with RGB cameras and AI to spot batteries and propane cylinders on a moving recycling line. Circular Services is installing it now — here is how the detection zone works, and which numbers nobody has published yet.
ExplainerAugust 13, 2026
Can old solar panels be "flotation-mined" for silver?
A University of Newcastle pilot ran end-of-life solar cell material through continuous froth flotation and recovered virtually all of its silver. Here is the mechanism, stage by stage — and what "nearly 100%" actually covers.
TeardownAugust 12, 2026
ERI Vietnam: a good partner, an unproven loop
A 50/50 e-waste venture between a large US recycler and a Vietnamese environmental-services group has real operational strengths. What it does not yet have is a plant, a permit, a mass balance or a named downstream buyer.
Myth-BustingAugust 7, 2026
A dead lithium-ion battery is not safe in the trash or the blue bin
A battery that no longer powers your device still holds enough energy to start a fire when it is crushed in a collection truck or a sorting line. The recycling symbol on it does not mean curbside.
Myth-BustingJuly 31, 2026
Recycling Everything Is Not Automatically More Circular Than Reuse
China's second-life battery decision is being read as a win for the circular economy. Shredding a working battery to recover its metals is the opposite of the waste hierarchy.
TeardownJuly 31, 2026
China Deletes the Second-Life Battery Rulebook
On 30 July, MIIT abolished the announcement-management system for cascade use of retired EV batteries. Not a ban on reuse — the removal of the official channel that made reuse financeable.