Mexico recently gained another foothold in the China-driven global lithium trade with the announcement by Ganfeng Lithium—one of the world’s largest producers and a supplier to Tesla—that they will construct a lithium-ion battery recycling plant in the country, Diálogo Chino reports.
Wang Xiaoshen, CEO of Ganfeng Lithium said the plant will supply the growing US electronic vehicle (EV) market and will recycle batteries from Tesla cars, as well as from the electric buses made in China that are used throughout Latin America.
“Chinese electric buses have been exported to South American countries for years and now is about time to recycle,” Wang told the Financial Times. “And Tesla has been selling in Mexico since 2012, so in the next couple of years they [the batteries] will be ready for retiring.”
Along with British minerals company Bacanora Lithium, Ganfeng is a partner in Mexico’s first lithium mine in the northern state of Sonora, which counts on one of the largest deposits in the world. Together, the Sonora mine and battery recycling plant will become a major node in the regional supply of lithium and other valuable elements, seemingly edging closer to the ideal of ‘closed cycles’ of production, whereby energy expended in manufacturing is returned to the production process through recycling, reducing emissions overall.
As a 2016 study by researchers at The Australian National University found, recycling lithium-ion batteries—which usually last two to three years or 300 to 500 charge cycles (whichever comes first)—“reduces energy consumption, reduces greenhouse gas emissions, and results in considerable natural resource savings when compared to landfill.”
A 2019 study published in Nature magazine observes that “end-of-life LIB [lithium-ion battery] recycling could provide important economic benefits, avoiding the need for new mineral extraction and providing resilience against vulnerable links and supply risks in the LIB supply chain”. Lithium battery recycling is thus a critical part of the global move away from reliance on fossil fuels.
Ganfeng’s announcement of the battery recycling plant in addition to the mining project was anticipated by Mexican politicians earlier in the year, with then-resources minister Victor Toledo declaring lithium to be ‘the new oil’. For a country whose economy has historically been underwritten by petroleum, Mexico now has a chance to join the global energy transition away from fossil fuels.
