LG Energy Solution and Toyota Tsusho Corporation established a joint venture to process battery waste in North Carolina, marking the South Korean battery maker’s first recycling operation in North America as competition intensifies for scarce raw materials.
The partnership, called Green Metals Battery Innovations LLC, will construct a pre-processing facility in Winston-Salem that aims to handle 13,500 tons of scrap annually by 2026 — equivalent to more than 40,000 automotive batteries. The plant will extract “black mass” containing nickel, cobalt and lithium from dismantled battery production waste, initially sourced from LG Energy’s manufacturing of Toyota EV batteries.
The move comes as North America’s battery recycling market, valued at approximately $374 million in 2023, is projected to expand at nearly 38% annually through 2030, driven by surging electric vehicle adoption and tightening environmental regulations. Major automakers are increasingly forging recycling partnerships to secure stable supply chains for critical minerals that have experienced price volatility due to geopolitical tensions.
LG Energy Solution previously established closed-loop operations in China in 2022 and announced a similar venture in France earlier this year. The company faces growing competition from established North American recyclers including Li-Cycle Corp., Redwood Materials and American Battery Technology Company, which have secured significant funding to expand capacity.
While executives positioned the venture as advancing a “circular economy,” the facility will only handle preliminary processing. The extracted materials must undergo additional refinement elsewhere before becoming usable in new batteries — highlighting the industry’s continued reliance on complex, geographically dispersed supply chains that recycling advocates aim to localize.
