What if the breakthrough in battery recycling wasn’t high-tech—but prehistoric?
As the world braces for a flood of end-of-life lithium batteries from electric vehicles and electronics, recycling systems are struggling to keep pace.
Current methods are often expensive, energy-intensive, and environmentally taxing. But a small UK startup believes the solution might lie in nature’s oldest engineers: bacteria that have been around for tens of millions of years.
Cell Cycle, a startup under the SER Group, has developed a novel approach called LithiumCycle that uses engineered microbes to break down batteries and recover critical minerals like lithium, nickel, and cobalt.
Bugs, not big furnaces
These bacteria, which have shaped metal formations for…