MotorTrend NOV 2024 / by Miguel Cortina / Read original article
China dominates the processing of metals that go into EV batteries, but an American company is trying to change the paradigm and source those minerals domestically.
Ryan Melsert likes to solve complex problems. The Penn State and Georgia Tech graduate saw a need to recycle EV batteries to reuse their minerals. A former founding member of Tesla’s Gigafactory team, Melsert was responsible for building and designing Tesla’s battery packs, and as he worked on the factory floor, he noted different types of waste materials from defective batteries and yield losses piling up.
“We saw that there were really no companies within North America that could take that type of waste, since those types of batteries were so new,” he said in an interview for our documentary MotorTrend Investigates: America’s EV Problems.
The mechanical engineer saw that his team had the skillset to reverse engineer the Gigafactory, taking those packs, modules, cells, and cuttings and strategically disassembling them while still electrically charged, ultimately recycling them and going all the way to making battery-grade metals.
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