A startup venture in New Zealand has discovered a way to extract critical battery minerals from rocks piled up as waste in mining operations.

Olivine is of little value beyond a smattering of niche uses like the semi-precious peridot production, sauna rocks in Finnish saunas, and a substitute for dolomite in steel works.

Aspiring Materials, however, has identified this silicate as a font of nickel-manganese-cobalt hydroxide, a component that’s used in high-density lithium ion batteries needed all over the world for electric vehicles, power tools, and energy storage solutions.

Cobalt is almost exclusively mined in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where issues such as violence, slavery, and human rights abuses have been well-documented. Nickel is produced mostly in Indonesia, and manganese in South Africa—both of whom export almost all of it for refinement to China.

Concerns among Western nations over critical minerals and the security, or lack thereof, in the supply of them has led entrepreneurs and engineers to look in non-traditional, potentially circular sources, for shoring up supply.

Enter olivine: which if pulled out of the ground during large-scale mining is typically piled up and sold as gravel. This unloved mineral can have nickel-manganese-cobalt hydroxide (NMH) leached out of it through a low-temperature, ambient pressure method that is powered by renewable energy.

According to a review of Aspiring Materials methods and strategy published in Spectrum, their small pilot plant in Christchurch, NZ, puts olivine sand into a series of vats and machines similar to those found in a dairy.

The sand is mixed with sulfuric acid until it becomes a sticky soup of elements. Several more steps of particle size and temperature control, along with a dash of caustic soda, produce three useful products.

50% of the extracted materials can be an analog to Portland cement, the most common building material in the world. 40% is a magnesium product that has a variety of uses, all of which are more valuable than the olivine itself.

THE CIRCULAR ECONOMY: This Home Siding Made from Rice Husks Saves Thousands of Trees and Diverts Crop Waste from Landfills

10% is a mixed metal product, of which 1% is the valuable NMH that governments around the world are trying to get their hands on.

The liquid remaining is funneled through electrolysis to recreate the acid needed to cause the reactions: a neat and tidy circular production method using widely available scrap material.

This kind of recovery and recycling is increasingly being valued for its dependability and low environmental impact.

MORE STORIES LIKE THIS: Chinese Scientists Produce ‘Impossible’ Steel to Line Nuclear Fusion Reactors in Major Breakthrough

Jim Goddin—who sat on the UK government’s expert committee that developed the country’s Critical Minerals Strategy in 2023—told Spectrum that while the high-acidic environment needed to extract NMH from olivine might result in a higher-cost end product, Western markets are progressively seeing cleaner production methods as worth the extra cost in the face of potential negative press from organizations that conduct reviews on sustainability.

SHARE This Story With Your Friends Who Work In Circular Markets…