Reprocessing battery waste helps UK and rest of world
THE term ‘upcycling’ is not necessarily used in everyday parlance but it is set to become just as important as recycling.
Birmingham company Aceleron is hoping to bring the concept to a global market as it processes the waste from lithium-ion batteries and reuses them as upcycled battery packs.
Chemical engineer Amrit Chandan leads business development while co-founder Carlton Cummins is a battery engineer who heads up technological development.
Mr Chandan said: “Batteries really shouldn’t be put into landfill as that can cause all sorts of problems to the water source and environment so they need to be recycled properly.
“But the problem is that the recycling technologies are not quite there yet. Aceleron is aiming to revolutionise access to low-cost energy storage by taking end-of-life lithium batteries and putting them into repurposed packs.
“We are able to offer high-quality lithium batteries which people in the poorest parts of the world can afford. We work with a whole range of different batteries from those you would find in a laptop all the way up to electric vehicle batteries.”
The firm is now just over a year old and has already grown its team to nine staff.
Mr Chandan said the company’s aim was to replace the acid battery market with lithium equivalents.
“These batteries are quite old and antiquated,” he said.
“Lithium performs a lot better, lasts longer and is lighter so in many parts of the world, where there aren’t electricity grids, people have to carry batteries to get their power at communal charging. Our key markets are both developed and developing countries. De-veloping countries are close to our hearts and we want to make people’s lives better but we recognise there’s a need for these batteries in the UK as well.
“What we want to do in the UK is prove our business model can work and we are doing that. Once we have this blueprint for how to repurpose these batteries and put them into use again, we want to copy that blueprint and put it out there, all around the world, so batteries within a region can be processed by the people of that region for use in that region.”