Dive Brief:

• The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded $62 million in grants for 17 projects meant to increase consumer electronics battery recycling and improve the economics of recycling such batteries.
• Recipients of the funding include AMP, the New York City Department of Sanitation, Li Industries, numerous university research teams and several regional waste management authorities.
• The DOE says recycled batteries from consumer electronics are a critical feedstock and an “essential part” of the Biden administration’s effort to invest in sustainable battery manufacturing. The grants are part of a total of $7 billion of funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to grow U.S. supply chains for batteries.

Dive Insight:

Battery and electronics recycling has become more of a federal focus in recent years, and the DOE is among the agencies funding innovation projects as a way to kickstart efforts to shore up a domestic supply of critical materials. 

“Capturing the full battery supply chain — from sourcing critical materials to manufacturing to recycling — puts the U.S. in the driver’s seat as we build our clean energy economy,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm in a statement. 

AMP, which provides automated sorting technologies that include AI and robotics, was awarded $6.43 million for its initiative to “demonstrate the viability of automated characterization and sorting of batteries within e-waste,” the company said in an email. Its goal, according to the DOE, is to establish a sorting process “with at least 25% efficiencies over the state of the art, if not more.”

Other recipients include the New York City Department of Sanitation, which will use its $2.15 million grant to hold at least 200 mobile battery collection drop-off events across each of the five boroughs with the goal of collecting least 35,000 pounds of batteries by the end of the project. 

Li Industries will work with Call2Recycle and the Argonne National Laboratory to create an “automated, integrated sorting and preprocessing solution” to make it faster and cheaper to recycle batteries. The project specifically aims to reduce transportation costs by putting the sorting and pre-processing steps at one facility, Li Industries said in its DOE proposal.  

Electronic Recyclers International will spend nearly $4.8 million on a “web-based educational platform” meant to help consumers and collectors locate recycling sites and follow regulatory guidelines for data security and storage. It will also launch an ad campaign to promote the platform. 

Other funding will go toward projects focusing on student education and outreach, e-waste collection events, AI-assisted sorting technology and battery storage solutions, the DOE said.

The funding follows other DOE-funded recycling projects. In March, the DOE announced a $4 million e-scrap recycling prize for recovery and reuse innovations. The DOE’s Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains in February announced up to $16 million meant to help retailers boost collection of used consumer batteries.