Earlier this year, BASF had to delay the opening of a battery materials plant in Finland when a court agreed with environmental groups that the company didn’t have a good plan to deal with its wastewater.
As battery factories spring up around the world, the specter of wastewater threatens to stall their construction. One startup, though, says the solution isn’t to dispose of it, but rather to recycle it.
Wastewater from these plants emerges laden with sodium sulfate, a by-product of sulfuric acid and caustic soda, two chemicals used in battery manufacturing, copper refining and other industries.
“We can totally create a circular economy around these reagent chemicals,” Bilen Akuzum, co-founder and CTO of Aepnus Technology, told TechCrunch.
Akuzum and co-founder Lukas Hackl didn’t set out to create a small circular economy; instead they stumbled upon it when touring lithium mining operations in California and Nevada. The pair of chemists, who have been friends since they met in their dorm’s cafeteria, were researching possible startup ideas.
“We were thinking about lithium extraction or something in the minerals space,” Akuzum said. “Every time we spoke to somebody from the industry, they were like, ‘Well, there are actually solutions for lithium extraction. But we have this waste product that’s coming out of our operations, and we really don’t know what to do with it.’”
After returning from the trip, Akuzum and Hackl turned the idea over in their heads, eventually deciding to refine an existing technology to turn that waste into raw materials that the facilities could use in their operations.
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