The Battery Recycling industry is experiencing explosive growth, and for good reason. According to Fastmarkets.com, The volume of battery materials available for recycling worldwide is forecast to increase seven-fold between 2020 and 2030, to reach 1.4 million tons. By 2040, more than seven million tons are expected to be available. Only a fraction of that recycling capacity currently exists.
Within the sector new battery technologies constantly emerge, often with unique recycling requirements. New processing technologies constantly emerge; Black Mass used to be processed this way but now there is a better way.
Add to this exciting new initiatives such as a battery ‘Passport’ to track batteries from the raw materials at the mine, to processing, to manufacturing, through useful lfe, to demanufacturing back to raw materials and then back into new batteries. This is but a single example among hundreds of new ideas being discussed.
So, if you want to track every single element of all this, in real time, everywhere, you are going to need a very capable software suite. Well, the Recyclesoft suite is exactly that and it is ready now.
The core product, ROMS (Recycling Operations Management System) was originally designed around the needs of the E-waste and ITAD verticals. These needs can be extremely complex. ROMS has been two and a half decades in development over many re-writes and it will support any level of complexity you may require. However, we have added many, many features especially designed for the battery recycling community. I’ll explain three examples of this.
Every transaction in ROMS is blockchain verified. So, anything that changes in the database is recorded in the blockchain. this is an essential feature should you truly need to track everything – and report it, as in a passport.
Batteries contain many complex materials (as well as not so complex, steel, for example). Those eventual complex materials may be the product of other secondary complex materials. These secondary materials may have been manufactured from raw materials of from other complex materials. Any given process will likely include a waste element plus other inputs such as water or solvents. This entire chain is modeled within ROMS. Not only this but should assay verification be required at any step, this is fully supported too.
The final example is our new Process Definition module. Any given manufacturing process has three sets of properties. Inputs (including power), outputs (including waste) and then there is the process itself; cost per unit of measure, time per unit of measure, equipment used etc. Any given process may be part of a chain of processes each with their own properties. These are also modeled within ROMS. So, at the top level process we might have ‘XYZ Lithium Ion Battery Manufacture’. Here, on the input side you have raw materials of whatever form, on the output side you (eventually) have batteries. Contained within that top level process you may have hundreds of smaller processes, some in tandem, some sequential, all with their inputs and outputs clearly defined. In between ROMS provides a complete monitoring of everything from A to Z.