Minimines, founded in 2020, says its battery recycling process to extract lithium and other precious metals is more cost-effective and sustainable than its competitors. The startup hopes that by making lithium extraction more efficient, it can help EVs become affordable in India.
It’s no secret that while electric vehicles (EVs) offer long-term savings by reducing expenditure on petrol or diesel, the benefits only start to pay off a couple of years down the road.
For most consumers, the long wait doesn’t justify the price tags of EVs, which can sometimes be 1.2 to 2.5 times higher than the cost of an ICE vehicle.
Minimines, a Bengaluru-based clean tech startup, says it has a solution that can potentially reduce the price of EVs.
The main culprit, responsible for the higher upfront cost of EVs, is the battery pack; in particular, the lithium-ion cells, which India currently imports from countries such as China and South Korea. EV batteries, in fact, account for up to 40% of the total cost of an EV, according to industry estimates.
To make EVs cheaper, it’s imperative that India produces its own lithium-ion cells, NITI Aayog’s adviser on infrastructure connectivity, transport, and e-mobility, Sudhendu Sinha, told YourStory in an earlier interview.
In the absence of very large lithium reserves (at least compared to China or South Korea), the easiest way for India to get the ball rolling on producing its own lithium-ion batteries is by recycling existing, defunct batteries, as well as other electrical equipment that contains the metal.
Currently, a majority of manufacturers dispose of their electronic waste, including batteries and battery components, by burning them at incineration facilities.
The few times the waste materials reach recycling centres, conventional extraction techniques like pyrometallurgy and carbothermal treatments often fall short of achieving complete metal extraction (because they result in amalgams or mixtures of elements and not the pure element itself), while also contributing to significant carbon dioxide emissions.
MiniMines says it has developed a more efficient, environment-friendly process to extract and recycle lithium and other precious metals from batteries and other industrial byproducts.
Founded by Anupam Kumar and Arvind Bhardwaj in 2021, the startup says that its proprietary hybrid-hydrometallurgy process can achieve a purity level of nearly 96%, and extract elements such as lithium and precious metals in their elemental states.
Importantly, the process does not produce any water, residual, or carbon dioxide waste or emissions, ensuring the entire process remains environment-friendly.
“India generates nearly 70,000 tonnes of lithium-ion waste annually…from cell phones to laptop and wireless headphones, Li-ion batteries are present everywhere, in most modern gadgets we discard. And while we invest a premium in importing lithium cells for our electric vehicles, a significant amount of valuable and recyclable lithium-ion waste is unfortunately discarded in landfills or incinerated,” Kumar tells YourStory in an interview.
