Restarted lithium recycling plant in Georgia plans 80 to 100 new jobs

From bankruptcy to restart in Covington, Georgia

R3 Lithium restarted a lithium recycling plant in Covington, Georgia, about 35 miles east of downtown Atlanta, that its own president and chief executive officer, Linh Austin, ran into Chapter 11 bankruptcy, a court process that lets a company reorganize or shut down what it owes, under its previous name, Ascend Elements, in April 2026. The Atlanta Journal Constitution reports Ascend Elements carried more than 103,000,000 dollars in long term debt at the time of that filing, a figure Austin gave while she was still Ascend Elements chief executive. R3 Lithium acquired the 154,000 square foot site in July 2026 and is now ramping toward new jobs and a bigger role in the domestic battery supply chain.

We consider that to be kind of a distant memory. I know it was only a few weeks ago, but it was really just a very different chapter.

Linh Austin, president and chief executive officer of R3 Lithium. Source 4.

A Georgia lithium recycling plant plans 80 to 100 new jobs

R3 Lithium expects to hire 80 to 100 more employees at the Covington plant as it ramps up production, the Atlanta Journal Constitution reports. The company already holds nearly 1,000,000,000 dollars in signed contracts to sell the lithium carbonate it plans to refine there, including one with the commodity trading company Trafigura, per the same reporting.

We are a large-scale refiner, and we want to be able to do this in multiple locations across the U.S.

Linh Austin, president and chief executive officer of R3 Lithium. Source 4.

What the restarted plant can produce

The Covington plant can shred up to 30,000 metric tons of battery material a year into black mass, a mix of recovered battery metals, R3 Lithium states of its own process. Its current line turns part of that into 2,500 metric tons of finished lithium carbonate a year, the lithium compound battery makers buy directly. The company has reserved space for a second, identical line it has not yet built, which would raise finished output to 5,000 metric tons a year if it gets built. The 2 totals are not a yield rate. Most of the shredded material becomes black mass and other byproducts, not pure lithium carbonate.

The money behind the restart

R3 Lithium raised a 15,000,000 dollar Series A round, an early stage investment that trades cash for part ownership of the company, from 3 investors to restart the plant, BEST Magazine reports, against an original investment of about 150,000,000 dollars BEST Magazine says it took to build the facility the first time. BEST Magazine also states R3 paid 3,000,000 dollars to buy the site in July 2026, a figure the Atlanta Journal Constitution does not confirm, reporting only that the purchase price was not disclosed.

A bet on more than half of United States lithium carbonate

In its own press release, not in the news coverage that followed, R3 Lithium projects the Covington facility will produce more than 50% of all lithium carbonate made in the United States in 2027. That claim sits inside a market where the United States today produces less than 1% of the world lithium, as R3 Lithium describes the industry it hopes to help fill. Eric Gratz, the chief technology officer and a co founder of Ascend Elements holding 43 patents in battery materials, is betting the same site that failed once can now supply a market the United States barely serves today.

The U.S. has spent years discussing critical mineral independence while the vast majority of lithium processing has remained overseas.

Linh Austin, president and chief executive officer of R3 Lithium. Source 3.