Prototypes to Watch for Sustainable Development

IMPROVED BATTERY RECYCLING

In recent years, improved battery and electric motor technology has led to a surge in the number of battery-powered vehicles around the world. As those early generation EVs begin to age, experts forecast a glut of old EV batteries by the middle of the next decade. The search is on for better ways to recycle them.

Smelting, or pyrometallurgy, has been the traditional method, in which recyclers throw the batteries in a furnace and separate out what they can. That method can have a 40 to 60 percent recovery rate of useful materials. Startups are pursuing recycling methods that have higher recovery rates. Some are looking at hydrometallurgy, which bathes batteries in acid or other chemicals to recover materials, while others are using direct recycling to physically strip recyclable material from old batteries.

Novocycle, a startup in Gebze, Turkey, is developing an improved version of the direct recycling process, reporting more than 90 percent of material recovery. One of the early steps in the recycling process for many direct and hydrometallurgical recyclers is to shred the batteries, which can often mix different materials into a hard-to-separate mass. Novocycle skips shredding, and instead, starts with meticulous preprocessing techniques to dismantle the battery, separate the anode and cathode, and then recover materials from both. After that, the process concludes with a post-treatment of electrodialysis and hydrometallurgy.

The biggest challenge in direct recycling processes is sorting and classifying the different types of batteries and their components, said Fatih Bosna, Novocycle’s co-founder. A multi-step evaluation such as the one Novocycle employs has the highest accuracy, and new tools are improving the process, Bosna said.

“Emerging technologies and methods based on AI and machine learning are currently in development that promise fast responses (seconds) with high accuracies (above 80 percent, sometimes above 92 percent),” Bosna said in an email.

HIGHLY SELECTIVE MEMBRANE FILTERS

Often, the waste products from small-scale industrial production are dumped untreated into the air and waterways used by vulnerable communities. One approach to reducing the pollution is to change some of the chemical processes used by industries to physical ones.

Chemfinity Technologies, Inc., is developing membranes and adsorbent “nano sponges” that can separate metals and other elements from liquid and gaseous mixtures. Their goal is to filter out pollutants and recover valuable resources. One of the company’s products, a porous polymer sorbent, could clean up a highly polluting gold mining industry in the Amazon.

The company, spun out of the University of California, Berkeley in 2022, is now based in Brooklyn, N.Y., and won four U.S. Small Business Innovation Grants in the last year. The team announced its latest grant, from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, in January 2025 to support its work purifying drainage water from mines.

“Miners can use our ecofriendly membranes to replace mercury and recover the gold they need to support their families,” co-founder Adam Uliana said.

Since launch, the team has laid groundwork for commercialization. It has scaled up the production of its novel materials and demonstrated real-world applications by separating valuable minerals from waste.

The company is now testing prototypes that target environmental applications, including critical metal recovery and water desalination.

BACTERIAL SENSOR

One concern shared by backcountry hikers and the managers of groundwater supplies for consumption in underserved communities alike is the potential for fecal contamination of drinking water. Lume is an E. coli sensor that can answer that question. Lume is in development by Virridy, a freshwater decarbonization startup spun out of the University of Colorado in Boulder.

The sensor employs tryptophan-like fluorescence and machine learning to estimate E. coli levels. Reports on bacteria levels are sent out automatically, and the whole system operates autonomously—just set it in the water and leave it.

The company also claims that the Lume costs less than competing sensors. The Virridy team is seeking beta testers for Lume now, in addition to field testing for the sensor in communities in Kenya.

"The next steps are to continue testing to strengthen the device’s sensitivity and refine the design of the hardware. We estimate that it may be ready for commercial use in two to three years," Virridy’s Whitney Knopp said.