Aqua Metals, Inc. announced it has completed equipment installation and is now operating its first-of-a-kind lithium battery recycling facility, utilizing electricity to recycle instead of intensive chemical processes, fossil fuels, or high-temperature furnaces. Located at the company's Innovation Center in the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center in Nevada, the pilot is now operational with the introduction of feedstock into the automated system, enabling immediate recovery of valuable critical minerals from spent lithium batteries. The company's Li AquaRefining™ technology is a low-emissions, closed-loop recycling solution capable of recovering all valuable metals, including high-purity lithium, manganese, cobalt, and nickel from lithium batteries.

The company's goal is to demonstrate through the pilot operations its belief that Li AquaRefining is an economically superior process that offers a lower cost pathway to recycle critical minerals and achieve net-zero emissions. Li AquaRefining utilizes electroplating powered by electricity to recover metals instead of intensive chemical processes or polluting fossil-fuel furnaces. The patent-pending Li AquaRefining enables low-cost and efficient production of high-purity products - drastically lowering emissions and limiting waste streams - and is designed to significantly reduce capital and operating costs.

Upcoming Milestones: With the pilot facility operational and on track, Aqua Metals anticipates the following milestones in the first quarter of 2023: Achieving targeted product specs for each high-purity metal; Ramping of the pilot facility to process metric tons of black mass per month; Becoming the first company in North America to recover battery-grade lithium hydroxide from spent lithium-ion batteries in commercial quantities.