Young Poong shares rally on innovative facility to dry-melt battery wastes

[Provided by Young Poong]

South Korea’s Young Poong Corp. shares rallied on Wednesday after it kicked off the word’s first commercial operation of a direct smelting plant that can recycle up to 2,000 tons of waste batteries a year to restore lithium and other precious metals.

According to the company’s announcement on Tuesday, it began the commercial operation of its new smelting facility in North Gyeongsang province that can process 2,000 tons of used batteries, which can power up to 8,000 electric vehicles, per year. It uses pioneering dry melting technology to recover more than 90 percent of lithium from used batteries.

Its shares soared 19.32 percent to 735,000 won ($538.03) during mid-day session on Wednesday.

Dry melting technology developed by Young Poong has simplified the process of recovering metals from waste batteries. The current wet leaching method requires two processing stages - powdering old batteries and extracting metals, such as lithium, nickel, manganese, and cobalt.

But dry melting technology, or direct smelting, breaks waste batteries into modules that can be immediately put into a melting pot to recover metals. The latest technology helps reduce battery recycling pretreatment periods and cost.

The company also opens a facility to produce LiB flakes, a core recycling source for its direct smelting technology. It will use the flakes to recover metals in its smelting facility.

By Seo Jin-woo and Jenny Lee