As we move more and more towards driving electric vehicles and away from gas-driven cars and trucks, I have noticed more and more stories about lithium – both ‘mined’ lithium, and ‘green lithium’. And while I am not any kind of expert on EVs or lithium batteries, it did strike me that the stories headed in two different directions – one, that we would need to create more lithium mines, or even recycle the ore from existing mines, or two, that different kinds of batteries could be developed that would start to replace lithium.

But a third possibility apparently exists – that someone would ‘upcycle’ lithium-ion batteries by recovering the key elements and turn them into a new product that works even better than the old one. This is exciting, for a whole variety of reasons.