New Delhi: If countries don’t have lithium resources, they can either pay whatever the market demands or find a way to reuse what they already have. Japan might be more aligned with the latter, and a big breakthrough might help them move in this direction. A facility in Fukui Prefecture has found a method to extract an impressive 90 per cent of the lithium from dead EV batteries, which is about double what such operations previously achieved.
For this breakthrough, there is JX Metals Circular Solution, which is a subsidiary of one of Japan’s largest non-ferrous metal companies. While it was announced back in April 2025, it has really come into the spotlight with some Japanese publications revealing the actual process at the company’s in Tsuruga.
The facility’s vice president, Tadashi Nakagawa, has told NHK that the team achieved this by reimagining the chemicals and methods that involved extracting lithium from spent battery cells.
How does the lithium-ion process from Japan differ?
The whole process starts with old batteries being separated and burned to strip away non-metal components. What is left is crushed into something that is termed black mass and is more or less a powder packed with recoverable metals. From that, a water-based chemical treatment, which is called hydrometallurgy, pulls lithium out.
A big difference in this process is that the lithium hydroxide, which is recovered, replaces a chemical traditionally used for refining. This cuts the carbon footprint by around 40 per cent compared to the previously used methods. For Japan, this breakthrough is quite important as the country has, up to now, almost imported every mineral it requires for batteries. That isn’t just lithium, but even cobalt and nickel. Quite a lot of refining has gone through China as well.
Japan has been trying to find a way around this. There is a new law coming into effect this year where manufacturers and importers are required to collect and recycle small portable batteries from the likes of power tools, vapes and phones. The government wants recyclers to hit about 70 per cent lithium recovery by 2030, and that does mean they are quite ahead with the 90 per cent figure.
Apart from Japan, there is Redwood Material in the US, a recycling company founded by former Tesla CTO JB Straubel, which says it has already recovered 95 per cent of lithium from the equivalent of about 2,50,000 EVs each year.
For Japan, it isn’t the technology that is the big issue, but rather getting the dead batteries to recyclers. Just about 14 per cent of end-of-life lithium-ion batteries in the country at present are making it through official collection channels. Many retired EVs are actually ending up getting exported, which makes those materials quite out of reach, and that is what the solution is needed for.