Inside a 154,000 square foot plant in Covington, Georgia, a conveyor feeds old batteries into a shredder.
What comes out is a fine dark powder called black mass.
Black mass looks like soot, but it holds lithium, cobalt, nickel and copper.
A series of chemical steps then pulls the lithium out of that powder and crystallizes it.
What arrives at the end is something the United States has almost no domestic supply of.
What the shredder actually does to a battery
A lithium ion cell is built in careful layers: a graphite anode, a metal oxide cathode, a thin polymer separator and an electrolyte soaked through all of it. When a shredder tears through that stack, the layers break apart and the metals are freed as a mixture of fine particles. That dark mixture is black mass, and it is the starting point for almost every lithium battery recycling process in use today.
But shredding alone does not separate the metals. The black mass still holds lithium, cobalt, nickel, manganese and copper mixed together at particle scale. Pulling a single element back out cleanly enough to rebuild a battery requires chemistry, not just machinery.
The Covington plant recovers lithium on site using a calciner based crystallization step followed by a water based precipitation process. The calciner drives off organics and converts lithium compounds into a form that dissolves readily, then the precipitation step drops lithium carbonate out of solution, leaving a concentrate of the other metals behind.
The number that makes this plant unusual
The shredding lines are rated to handle 30,000 metric tons of battery material a year, taking in both manufacturing scrap and end of life batteries and reducing them to black mass. The lithium line attached to them is far smaller, rated at 2,500 metric tons of lithium carbonate a year, with floor space set aside for a second line of the same size.
The operator says its line was the first of its kind to produce lithium carbonate at 99 percent purity from entirely recycled content at production scale in the US. Purity matters because cathode makers buy to tight specifications, and impurities carried into a cathode cost cell performance.
The two tonnage figures measure different things and are not a recovery ratio. Shredding scales comparatively easily; refining the powder into a salable salt is the step that has mostly happened overseas.
Why the US had almost none of this before
Domestic primary output comes from a single commercial brine operation in Nevada, which federal permitting documents describe as the only operational lithium production in the country. The US Geological Survey withholds the national production figure to protect proprietary company data, which is its own measure of how thin the sector is.
That calculus shifted as electric vehicles moved from novelty to mainstream. Manufacturing scrap from new battery plants began piling up faster than existing recyclers could handle, and the prospect of millions of end of life packs arriving within a decade made the case for a domestic loop hard to ignore.
Lead acid car batteries are recycled at about 99 percent in the US, according to the trade association that commissions the count, while lithium ion batteries sit under 15 percent. The gap is not a chemistry problem. Collection routes for spent lithium packs simply do not exist at the same scale.
What the plant means for the supply chain
The operator projects the plant will account for more than half of all US produced lithium carbonate in 2027. That projection draws on a very small base, and it says as much about the modest size of the US refining sector as it does about the plant’s output.
The logic echoes other recycling loops. With 9.2 million tons of glass missing American recycling bins each year, the distance between what a closed loop can do and what actually gets fed into it remains enormous. Battery recycling sits at a similar early point.
An estimate from the International Council on Clean Transportation put US processing capacity at roughly 100,000 metric tons of battery material a year, with announced projects pushing past 650,000 metric tons by the end of the decade. The infrastructure, in other words, is being built in fast forward.
Where the loop is still open
Lithium is not the only marketable output. What remains after lithium is removed is a concentrate of nickel, cobalt, manganese and graphite that the operator intends to sell separately. Newer cathode chemistries are shifting toward lower cobalt content, which changes what a recycler can profitably extract, and future battery chemistries will decide whether the recovery math stays favorable.
The feedstock question is also unsettled. The plant is built to take both factory offcuts and genuine end of life packs pulled from retired vehicles. The first is far easier to collect today than the second.
When the first large wave of EV batteries reaches retirement age, that feedstock will look different: physically larger, more varied in chemistry and harder to gather. Even so, the Covington facility has shown that high purity lithium carbonate can be recovered from recycled cells on American soil at commercial scale. Scientists pressing mineral binder into waste sawdust face the same upstream problem: the process exists, but the flow of material to feed it is still being built.
Read the whole thing?
Get the week's signal, not the noise
Our sharpest reporting on energy, climate and nature — free, once a week.
