Industry urged to recycle lithium
The WA Mining Conference attracted pre-eminent experts across the fields of mining, automation, cybersecurity, digital transformation and artificial intelligence across the two-day conference that took place at the Perth Convention and Exhibition Centre. The inaugural event attracted attendees from Alcoa, Anglo Gold Ashanti, BHP, Fortescue, KMPG, Mitsui Iron Ore Development, Monadelphous, Origin Energy, Oz Minerals, Newmont, Rio Tinto, Roy Hill Holdings, South 32, Woodside and many more.
LITHIUM Australia chief executive officer Adrian Griffin has detailed the impact of new mineral demand on industry and infrastructure needs, with the aspiration to ‘close the loop’ on the energy-metal cycle in an ethical and sustainable manner.
Speaking at the WA Mining Conference and Exhibition in Perth, he said that there was more lithium going to waste at the moment than there is in the supply chain.
“What we’ve got to do is maximise the benefit of technology and infrastructure to supply a more sustainable product to the consumer,” he said.
Mr Griffin said that lithium has fairly poor recoveries (between 50-70pc) with around half of the solids from spodumene recovery process ending up in tailings dams.
“They’re using the wrong technology. And why is that? Because they don’t control the supply chain and effectively the infrastructure,” he said.
“Then we get to the consumer side and it’s not much better. “Only around 9pc of lithium batteries on a global scale get back into the supply chain, and in Australia only around 2pc gets back into the supply chain.
“Municipal dumps are becoming the lithium and cobalt mines of tomorrow.”
The lithium battery in a mobile phone consists of about 30pc cobalt – around 300 times the grade of what’s produced from a cobalt mine – so it makes sense to re-use that material considering all the effort that went into its original production.
“We need to get on the tail end of the production cycle and capture, not only embedded energy that went in to making that battery, but return the metals to the battery industry,” Mr Griffin said.
Lithium Australia has taken steps to recover these materials, announcing the increase of its equity in Envirostream Australia ( a mixed battery recycling company) from 18.9-23.9pc.
The company has already, at laboratory scale, successfully recovered metals from separated batteries, used the lithium so retrieved to regenerate cathode materials and, from those materials, manufactured coin-cell LIBs - the testing of which vindicated the company’s aim of closing the loop on the energy-metal cycle.
“We’ve got all these batteries lying around but only 3pc of them are getting recycled. There’s an enormous commodity there going to waste,” Mr Griffin said.
“We believe that not only is it the right thing to do but that we can make money out of it.
However, issues remain around the cultural shift needed to encourage recycling at the consumer level to ensure these materials get back into the production cycle.
“One of the problems is that there aren’t that many places that you can take the batteries,” Mr Griffin said.
“We’ve got to make it easier for people so they don’t have to go far and they know where the collection stations are – so we can start to collect batteries.
“By doing this we not only will reduce the energy footprint of the product, but the impact will go right down the chain to the mine site because the mine site won’t have to mine as much material in the first place,” he said.
Mr Griffin said that recycling is the support needed to close the loop.
“We’ve got to improve efficiency by supplying the miners and processes with better processing technology, and we’ve got to track the material through to end of life so we can pick it up and reprocess to take all the valuable materials out,” he said.
“We have all the ingredients to do this, what we’ve got to do is convince the mining industry at large, convince the battery industry at large and more importantly convince the public that they can get on board and help by recycling those materials.”