Collection is the weakest link in India’s battery recycling ecosystem: MiniMines CEO

Can recycling become a strategic pillar of India’s critical-mineral security, or will the country remain dependent on imported lithium, cobalt and nickel despite growing recycling capacity?

We believe India needs both mining and recycling to build a stronger domestic supply of critical minerals. Mining will remain important, but it takes years to develop new resources. Recycling gives us an opportunity to recover the minerals that are already present within the country and put them back into the supply chain.

India is heavily dependent on imports for critical battery minerals such as lithium, cobalt and nickel. A meaningful part of this demand can be met by materials that already exist here, sitting in batteries that have reached end of life, or in manufacturing scrap from our own cell factories. Every kilogram we recover is a kilogram that doesn’t need to be imported again.

But how that material is recovered matters just as much as how much is recovered. Simply breaking a battery down and selling off the raw powder, what’s called black mass, doesn’t actually reduce dependence, because someone still has to refine it, and that refining often happens overseas before it comes back to India as an import. Real domestic supply only happens when that material is taken all the way through to refined, battery-grade materials that a manufacturer can use directly.

So yes, battery recycling can meaningfully reduce India’s dependence on imports over time. The volumes of end-of-life EV batteries are still building up because many of the EVs sold in recent years have not reached the end of their first life yet. But as those batteries enter the recycling stream, the opportunity to recover critical minerals domestically will grow significantly. For India, recycling can therefore become an important secondary source of these minerals, alongside mining and domestic refining.

India’s battery-waste volumes are expected to rise sharply over the next decade. How significant could this “urban mine” become as a source of critical minerals for domestic manufacturing?

This is a resource opportunity that India is only beginning to tap. India’s lithium-ion battery waste is estimated to  grow from around 19,000 tonnes in 2023 to nearly 233,000 tonnes by 2035. That represents a very large domestic pool of lithium, cobalt, nickel, and other critical minerals that can be recovered instead of being lost as waste.

The key is to recover these materials to a quality that allows them to go back into manufacturing. At MiniMines, our Hybrid-Hydrometallurgy process combines extraction, separation and purification, with high recovery efficiency across critical minerals, including lithium, cobalt, and nickel.

So, yes, end-of-life batteries can become an important domestic source of critical minerals. As India’s EV fleet grows and more batteries reach end of life, this urban mine will only get larger. Our opportunity is to recover that material and turn it back into a resource for India’s next generation of manufacturing.

EV sales and domestic battery manufacturing are scaling rapidly in India. Is the country’s recycling infrastructure keeping pace with this growth, particularly as demand for batteries in EVs and energy storage increases?

The surge in EVs and battery manufacturing is happening faster than recycling capacity is catching up.

Part of the reason is simple that for years, most lithium-ion battery waste in India wasn’t recycled properly at all. Companies would shred batteries, extract whatever metal was easy to recover, and dump the rest, and a lot of that rest. The cathode material and unrecovered lithium and cobalt ended up sitting in landfills instead of coming back into the supply chain. That’s not really capacity, instead it’s a shortcut, and it means the minerals inside those batteries left the country instead of coming back into use.

What’s changing this is where the recycling plants are located and how they’re built. We deliberately set up near gigafactories, so within a 50-kilometre radius we have direct access to the scrap coming out of cell manufacturing, that’s a steady, predictable source of material, rather than waiting for someone to bring us used batteries. It also solves a real problem for manufacturers. Lithium battery scrap is hazardous waste, so picking it up quickly and processing it properly is something they need, not just something we’re offering.

Other problems are also easing. Battery collection and end-of-life tracking have improved, so more batteries are now actually coming in for recycling instead of disappearing into informal channels or landfills.

That kind of setup, close to the source and built to handle real volumes, is what capacity actually needs to look like. It’s growing now, faster than it ever has, but it started from very little, so it’s still catching up to how fast EVs and battery manufacturing are scaling.

What is currently the weakest link in India’s battery-recycling ecosystem: collecting end-of-life batteries, building sufficient processing capacity, or recovering minerals at the quality needed for domestic cell manufacturing?

Collection is the tightest gap today. A lot of end-of-life batteries in India still move through informal, unorganised channels rather than reaching proper recyclers at all. That’s the point where the most value quietly leaks out of the system, because material that never reaches a recycler can’t be processed no matter how good your technology is.

On the organised side, this is solvable, and we’ve built our own model around solving it, partnerships with OEMs, including two-wheeler EV makers and battery manufacturers, plus locating ourselves within a 50-kilometre radius of multiple gigafactories so we get a steady, predictable stream of cell manufacturing scrap. That works well for scrap. It’s the consumer-facing collection, batteries coming out of EVs, phones, laptops once they’ve actually been used and discarded, where informal channels still dominate, and that’s the harder piece to fix.

Recycling capacity is the next gap, but it’s closing quickly. Capacity is growing faster than it has at any point so far. It’s still catching up to where EV and battery manufacturing volumes are heading, but the direction is right.

Domestic mineral recovery is actually the part of the chain that’s already working well. Once material reaches a plant built to process it fully, extraction, separation, purification, recovery efficiency of more than 96%. That’s not the constraint. The constraint is making sure enough material gets to that stage in the first place.

So the order, honestly, is fix collection first, capacity will keep closing on its own as investment comes in, and recovery is the one piece of this chain that’s already proven.