As India’s automotive fleet transitions toward electrification, batteries are becoming the lifeblood of national transportation. However, India possesses minimal domestic reserves of lithium, cobalt, and nickel. Urban mining through battery recycling is therefore not merely an environmental obligation—it is an economic imperative.
The Regulatory Driver: BWMR 2022 Mandates
The Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) notified the Battery Waste Management Rules (BWMR), replacing legacy guidelines. Under these rules, Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) targets are strictly enforced: producers, importers, and EV OEMs must ensure that 100% of end-of-life batteries are systematically tracked, recovered, and recycled.
Moreover, the rules mandate minimum mandatory recovery rates of critical materials: reaching 90% recovery of cobalt, nickel, and copper, and up to 70% recovery of lithium by 2026-2027.
From Hazardous Black Mass to Battery-Grade Precursors
The core technical challenge lies in the extraction of Black Mass—the concentrated mixture of cathode and anode powders containing lithium metal oxides, cobalt, nickel, and graphite.
Shree Alliance uses specialized hydrometallurgical leaching processes designed in collaboration with academic institutions. Unlike polluting pyrometallurgical smelting which burns off lithium into slag, our selective hydrometallurgical circuit achieves >99% chemical purity for Lithium Carbonate and Cobalt Sulfate, enabling these minerals to cycle directly back into cell gigafactories.