Ascend Elements and Koura have signed an agreement to jointly develop Ascend’s hydro-to-anode graphite recycling technology, as well as discussing plans to build a facility in the United States (US), likely to make use of Inflation Reduction Act tax credits. The companies claim the hydro-to-anode process produces 99.9% pure graphite from end-of-life batteries and from black mass (effectively crushed up batteries). This would imply a heavily circular economy for the anode side, though it wouldn’t be perfectly efficient unless silicon additives were extracted at a similar level of efficiency. Though even with such a heavily circular system with efficiency levels as high as are being claimed here, the issue with recycling will remain acquiring feedstock outside of manufacturing scrap while…