The one plant that already runs
Ascend Elements has run a battery recycling plant in Covington, Georgia, since August 2022, taking in 30,000 metric tons a year of used lithium ion batteries and manufacturing scrap. The company says that scrap equals about 70,000 electric vehicle batteries a year. The plant uses a process the company calls Hydro to Cathode, which pulls metals out of old batteries and turns them straight into material for new battery cathodes, the part inside a battery that stores its charge. Of the 4 named United States sites in this accounting, this Georgia plant is the only one confirmed running today.
The one plant still being built
Redwood Materials is building a battery materials campus in McCarran, Nevada, backed by a conditional federal loan offered by the Department of Energy in February 2023, with a ceiling of 2 billion dollars. Conditional means Redwood still has to meet requirements the government set before any of that money moves. Once finished, the plant is planned to produce about 36,000 metric tons a year of copper foil, a thin sheet of copper used inside battery cells, and about 100,000 metric tons a year of cathode active material, the part of a battery that stores its charge. Those figures describe what comes out of the finished plant, not how many tons of used batteries or scrap go into it, so they cannot be compared directly with a recycling intake figure such as the 30,000 metric tons Georgia takes in.
The one plant that is still only a promise
Cirba Solutions was selected in September 2024 for negotiation over a federal award with a ceiling of 200 million dollars, funded under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, a federal law that funds infrastructure projects, to build a battery materials campus in Columbia, South Carolina. No source read confirms that construction has begun. Once built, the company says the plant would take in more than 60,000 tons of batteries a year, enough to yield battery grade salts for about 500,000 electric vehicle batteries a year. Cirba Solutions describes the South Carolina site as its seventh operational facility, meaning the company already counts 6 others as running.
The 2 Kentucky figures are the federal grants Resource Recycling reported were cancelled before Ascend Elements filed for bankruptcy, source 4. The South Carolina figure is up to 200 million dollars, the ceiling of a federal award Cirba Solutions was selected to negotiate for, not yet decided, source 3. A cancelled grant and an award still being negotiated are not the same kind of promise, one already failed and the other has not been resolved.
Show the numbers
| Kentucky, larger grant, cancelled | 316 |
| South Carolina, award being negotiated | 200 |
| Kentucky, smaller grant, cancelled | 164 |
This project advances the growth trajectory Cirba Solutions is on, working to expand lithium ion recycling capacity in order to achieve a closed loop domestic supply chain.
David Klanecky, chief executive officer and president of Cirba Solutions. Source 3.
The one project that collapsed
Ascend Elements, the same company running the Georgia plant, also announced a battery materials project called Apex 1 in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. The federal government granted the project 164 million dollars, then a further 316 million dollars, before cancelling both grants, 480 million dollars combined, a MAOWCE calculation from the 2 figures Resource Recycling reported. Ascend Elements then filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, a court process that lets a struggling company reorganize its debts rather than close right away, on April 9, 2026, in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas. No source read states a capacity figure for the Kentucky site at all.
Georgia is a metric ton figure from a plant already running, reported by Ascend Elements, source 5. South Carolina is a plain ton figure from a plant that is still only announced, reported by Cirba Solutions, source 3. Cirba Solutions words the South Carolina figure as more than 60,000, so that bar is a floor, not an exact figure. The 2 kinds of ton differ by less than 10%, small enough that the size difference shown here still holds, but the South Carolina plant has not been built.
Show the numbers
| South Carolina, Cirba Solutions, announced | 60 |
| Georgia, Ascend Elements, running | 30 |
How small the confirmed total is
The Department of Energy counted 35,500 short tons, a unit of weight about 9% lighter than the metric ton used for the Georgia figure above, of United States capacity in 2023 to turn battery scrap into finished, sellable materials, citing an Argonne National Laboratory report. It counted a further 76,000 short tons of that same kind of capacity as planned. Only 1 of the 4 named plants in this accounting, the Georgia plant at 30,000 metric tons a year, is confirmed to be moving material through it today.