As India accelerates its electric mobility and renewable energy transition, securing critical minerals such as lithium, cobalt, nickel and copper is becoming increasingly important. Metastable Materials is addressing this challenge by developing technologies to recover and refine these minerals from end-of-life lithium-ion batteries. In this interaction with Machine Edge Global, Shubham Vishvakarma, Founder and Chief of Process Engineering, Metastable Materials, discusses the company’s “waste-to-ores” approach, technology innovations, battery chemistry flexibility, and its vision for building a resilient domestic critical-minerals supply chain.
India’s transition to electric mobility and renewable energy is driving demand for critical minerals. How is Metastable Materials working to build a domestic and more resilient supply chain for lithium, cobalt, nickel and copper?’
India’s energy transition goals are one of the world’s most ambitious, when at the same time a significant portion of the upstream supply of minerals remains dependent on international markets.
At Metastable Materials, we are addressing this from the secondary resource side of the supply chain. Conventional method of critical minerals sourcing starts with mining ie extract or, refine it and convert into industrial materials. The alternative route is recovering those minerals from materials that have already entered the economy, particularly end of life lithium ion batteries.
How we see it , India has a growing resource sitting in its own country of waste batteries containing lithium, nickel, cobalt, copper and other valuable materials. Those materials should not have to leave the country as a low-value waste or intermediate stream. They can be recovered, refined and brought back into the domestic materials ecosystem.
That is where Metastable is positioning itself. We are not simply trying to increase the amount of battery waste that gets processed. We are building technology and processing capacity to convert that waste into usable mineral products.
Our ambition is to develop domestic capacity for the recovery and refining of critical minerals, so that recycled materials can increasingly complement primary mineral imports. Over time, this can create a more resilient supply chain in which India has greater control over an additional source of strategically important materials.
Your “waste-to-ores” approach treats end-of-life batteries as a source of valuable raw materials rather than waste. What is the thinking behind this model, and how significant could it be for India’s circular economy?
“Waste-to-ores” is a deliberate way to look at the end of life battery. A battery may reach the end of its useful life as a product but the minerals inside it have not disappeared. So from a materials perspective, the end of life battery is much closer to a secondary ore body than conventional waste.
In fact, battery feedstock materials have already undergone processing before the reach a recycler. So the mineral value has effectively been brought closer to the surface and concentrated into a manufactured product. So it is an urban or secondary ore resource.
India;s battery ecosystem is expanding rapidly and all batteries entering into the market today are a future source of secondary materials. So the question is whether those materials are recovered domestically and returned to the supply chain. For us, circularity is therefore not simply about responsible disposal. It is about recovering the material value embedded in products and putting it back into productive use.
Metastable Materials has developed patent-pending technology that claims recovery of more than 90% of critical minerals across different battery chemistries. What differentiates your technology from conventional battery recycling and mineral recovery processes?
There are different technological approaches and each has its advantages and limitations
Conventional pyrometallurgical processes use high temperatures to recover certain metals and hydrometallurgical processes use leaching, and separation and precipitation steps. Both can be effective but they also present trade offs around energy consumption, reagent use, waste streams, recovery of individual elements and feedstock flexibility.
Our approach uses thermochemical reactions to enable selective recovery of its battery materials. Materials within the battery enables separation and extraction based on its properties without requiring external reduction reactions. The objective is to maximise recovery while producing defined material streams that can subsequently be refined and sold into industrial applications. That becomes particularly important when dealing with different chemistries. LCO, NMC and LFP have substantially different compositions, and a commercially viable recycling technology needs to be able to deal with that variability.
Our technology is designed with that flexibility in mind. The greater than 90% recovery figure is therefore best understood as a process-performance objective demonstrated across relevant materials and chemistries, rather than suggesting that every element in every battery is recovered at exactly the same rate. Feed composition and operating parameters matter. Ultimately, what differentiates the technology commercially is the combination of recovery, product quality, chemistry flexibility.
Achieving industrial-grade purity from recycled materials is a major challenge. How does Metastable Materials refine recovered minerals to meet the quality requirements of battery manufacturers and other advanced industries?
This is one of the most important distinctions between recovering a material and actually creating a useful industrial product. Producing intermediate material such as black mass is the beginning. The downstream challenge is to separate the different constituents, remove impurities, and produce material with a sufficiently controlled chemical composition to be accepted by an industrial customer. Depending on the feed chemistry and target product, this involves controlled separation and refining for the specific material lines. Analytical testing and process control are integral to our operation. We characterise feedstock, monitor intermediate streams and test finished products so that the output is defined by the requirements of the customer.
With battery chemistries continuing to evolve, how adaptable is your technology to newer chemistries and changing compositions of lithium-ion batteries?
Chemistry flexibility is fundamental to the economics of battery recycling.
The market is already heterogeneous. NMC exists in different formulations, LCO remains important in consumer electronics, and LFP is becoming increasingly significant in electric mobility and energy storage. Over time, we will also see newer chemistries and cell architectures entering the market.
A recycling process designed around one chemistry can therefore become obsolete if the feedstock mix changes significantly.
Our approach is designed to allow process parameters to be adjusted according to the chemistry and composition of the incoming material. That is one of the advantages of having a thermochemical process architecture rather than relying on a single fixed recipe.
We are working across NMC, LCO and LFP feedstocks, while continuing R&D on how the process parameters need to change for different compositions.
As India seeks to establish a complete battery supply chain—from raw materials and cell manufacturing to recycling—where does Metastable Materials see itself fitting into this ecosystem, and what gaps still need to be addressed?
If you map the battery value chain from beginning to end, it runs from mining and mineral refining through precursor and cathode materials, cell manufacturing, battery-pack assembly, first-life use, potentially second-life applications, and ultimately recycling and material recovery.
India is developing capabilities across several of these areas, but the ecosystem is still fragmented. Our position is at the material-recovery and refining layer. We take end-of-life batteries and other battery-derived feedstocks and seek to convert them into refined mineral products—such as lithium compounds, nickel- and cobalt-containing intermediates and copper—that can feed back into industrial supply chains.
In an increasingly integrated Indian battery ecosystem, those materials can ultimately become inputs for downstream cathode, precursor and cell manufacturing.
There are, however, several gaps that India still needs to address.
The first is collection and reverse logistics. Recycling capacity is meaningless without a reliable flow of appropriate feedstock. India’s battery collection ecosystem is improving, but it remains fragmented, particularly across smaller consumers and distributed waste streams.
The second is downstream processing. Recovering lithium, nickel and cobalt is only one part of the supply chain. India also needs greater domestic capability in precursor and cathode active-material manufacturing so that recovered minerals have a clear route back into battery production.
Other than these glaring gaps, there is also a need for overall technology development, need for skilled manpower, etc.
Looking ahead over the next five years, what scale of operations does Metastable Materials aspire to achieve, and what role do you believe advanced mineral recovery and refining can play in making India a global hub for critical-mineral processing?
Over the next five years, our focus is on scaling industrial-scale processing capability and then expanding that platform.
India is unlikely to become the lowest-cost source of every primary critical mineral. Countries with significant geological reserves will continue to have an advantage in primary extraction. But critical-mineral processing is a different opportunity.
Secondary resources are distributed across economies that consume batteries and electronic products. What determines who captures that value is increasingly technology, processing capability, scale, energy economics and the ability to produce consistent material specifications.
India has several structural advantages: a large and growing domestic market, engineering and manufacturing capabilities, an expanding battery ecosystem and, increasingly, a policy framework recognising critical-mineral recycling as strategically important.
If we can develop the capability to recover and refine critical minerals domestically, there is eventually an opportunity not only to serve Indian demand but to participate in the broader regional and global critical-mineral processing market.
That is the larger ambition for Metastable. We want to help build India’s secondary critical-minerals industry, where end-of-life batteries become feedstock, advanced processing converts that feedstock into refined materials, and those materials re-enter the manufacturing economy. In that sense, the opportunity is not simply to close the loop on batteries. It is to build another source of critical-mineral supply for India, and close the loop on minerals.