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For millennia, we’ve mined and refined materials to power our civilisations and industries, and feed consumer demand for products. This has traditionally been a linear process: dig material from the ground, purify and convert it into useful forms, manufacture products for use and then dispose of these products.

However, with electric vehicles – which are subject to technology disruption, changing regulations and uncertain geopolitical factors – driving a surge in demand for battery materials, is it time to rethink the mining value chain?

“The scale of the decarbonisation task requires a lot of new mines,” says Worley vice president, battery materials, Greg Pitt.
“But it also depends on a greater role for recycled materials already mined, which exist in batteries and other electronic devices.”

These devices – currently found within homes, warehouses, aging electrical infrastructure and more – make up the “urban orebody”. Their materials could be worth tens of billions of dollars. And if the industry can recycle these materials, it could reduce both the time to get metal to market and environmental impacts compared with traditional mining and materials processing.

So, if more minerals, metals, and battery grade materials needed for the energy transition come from recycling, rather than new mines and facilities, how will this impact established players within the mining industry?

Assessing the urban orebody

Modern technologies are capable of recycling certain commodities, such as steel, aluminium, copper and lead. As Pitt explains, when existing technologies and devices reach end of life, the materials can be economically placed back into service to create more products for consumption.

“If we consider high nickel cathode variants, the importance of recycling is emerging quickly,” he says. “This is partly because of policy settings, such as the minimum threshold for recycled content mandated by the European Battery Regulations. It’s also being driven by feedstock security needs, and some part by pure economics to maximise value streams from off spec material and production waste.
“Value chain players, particularly cathode material manufacturers, are now conceiving ‘closed loop’ systems in their investment strategies to capture and re-purpose battery waste back into their processing facilities,” says Pitt.
“This is good news for reducing the environmental impact of battery production, as it’s possible to achieve greater sustainable outcomes by using more recycled content, but there is still a hill to climb for recycling technologies to deliver efficient yield recovery economically. The battery value chain is no longer linear.”

How could the urban orebody impact the traditional mining industry?

The emergence of recycling means miners of the future can extract value from both ends of the value chain: natural resources in the earth’s crust, and the urban ore body that exists in recovered batteries, off spec cathode…