Just been looking at the battery recycling space and there's some genuinely interesting plays emerging here. With potentially 300 million EVs on the road by 2030, someone's gotta deal with all those dead batteries, right? And that's where battery recycling companies come in.

Li-Cycle is one worth watching. They've got major operations in North America and just fired up their first main processing line in Germany with another one coming later this year. Each line can handle 10,000 tonnes of lithium-ion battery material annually, and when fully operational, that German facility alone hits 30,000 tonnes per year. Pretty massive scale. Plus they're getting $375 million in DOE loan support to build out their North American recovery facility.

Then there's Umicore with facilities spread across the US, China, Belgium, and Germany. They've been in the recycling game for a while but I think battery recycling is where they're gonna see real margin expansion. The company's been relatively flat overall, so leaning into this growing segment makes sense strategically.

RecycLiCo is the riskier play here - they pivoted from American Manganese late last year and are focused on turning cathode scrap into black mass and ultimately battery precursors. Their demo plant went live in late 2022 and they got product validation in April. Still early stage but the concept has legs.

Ganfeng Lithium is already one of the world's largest lithium producers with operations across Africa, Australia, Argentina, Ireland, and Mexico. They've been quietly building out battery recycling operations too, with a major project underway in Jiangxi province. Diversified network, diversified opportunity.

American Battery Technology pioneered closed-loop recycling and they've got a 137,000 square foot facility in Nevada designed to process 20,000 MT of battery feedstock annually. The tech lets them separate, recover, and purify critical materials from end-of-life batteries.

Even the consumer giants are getting involved. Apple announced they're hitting 100% recycled cobalt in all batteries by 2025, and magnets in their devices will use recycled rare earth elements. They've already gone from 13% recycled cobalt in 2021 to 25% by 2022.

BYD's been smart about this too - they partnered with Itochu back in 2020 to collect spent EV batteries from their dealerships across China and convert them into energy storage systems. As EV battery volumes keep climbing, especially in China which accounts for half of global EV sales, that's a growing stream of material to work with.

The battery recycling companies space is definitely one to keep tabs on. This isn't speculation - it's infrastructure that has to exist as the EV fleet matures.