Excellent results from our metal recoveries test work conducted for Iondrive Limited, South Korea’s battery recycling sustainable pioneer. Our expertise was sought to conduct extensive, independent verification testing for their deep eutectic solvent (DES) battery recycling technology.

Iondrive’s large scale bench trials were completed utilising their Deep Eutectic Solvents (DES) process at the University of Adelaide with a 1,000x scale-up that resulted in 120g of black mass from the initial small-scale trials of 120mg.

The (DES) method, when paired with safe, biodegradable organic solvents, creates an eco-friendly and non-toxic approach to the production of ‘black mass’- the resultant powdered mix of shredded battery anodes and cathodes that contain critical minerals lithium, cobalt, nickel, and manganese.

This methodology leaves a far less damaging environmental footprint than the current techniques implemented for waste battery recycling to obtain black mass. These techniques involve energy-intensive, pyrometallurgical processes, high-temperature smelting and hydrometallurgical leaching.

Iondrive’s CEO, Dr Ebbe Dommisse commented that ‘The independent verification of our large-scale bench trials at a 1,000x scale-up of earlier University research, is a significant milestone for Iondrive. It confirms that our (DES) battery recycling scales effectively and maintains high level recovery rates with minimal solvent losses.”

Our test work confirmed the following:

High metal recoveries – Both the University and our testing confirmed that metal recoveries remained high, demonstrating the process’s efficiency in the extraction of critical minerals.