
Govt-backed project to recover lithium, cobalt, nickel from used batteries
battery recycling
project capable of recovering up to 99 per cent of lithium, cobalt, nickel and manganese from used lithium-ion batteries.
The project, titled 'Technologies for generation of battery grade materials and value addition through closed loop,' will focus on the commercialisation of an indigenous
hydrometallurgical process
to extract battery-grade materials, the Ministry of Science & Technology said in a statement.
BatX Energies has developed a proprietary low-temperature, low-pressure recycling process that is agnostic to lithium-ion battery chemistries. The dual-mode (wet and dry) black mass recovery system achieves recovery rates between 97 per cent and 99 per cent, the company said.
The end-to-end process, including battery collection, shredding, metal leaching, and downstream purification, is entirely indigenously developed and patented. BatX has filed seven patents, of which two have been granted.
'The shift toward
electric mobility
and renewable energy must be matched by equally robust recycling infrastructure. Supporting indigenous technologies like that of BatX Energies strengthens our
clean energy
supply chain, enhances strategic mineral independence, and positions India to lead in sustainable industrial innovation,' said Rajesh Kumar Pathak, Secretary, TDB.
According to BatX, the recovered battery-grade compounds—such as lithium carbonate and cobalt sulphate—meet international specifications and are intended for both domestic and export markets.
'TDB's support is a game-changer for us. It validates our commitment to green technology and enables us to scale a truly indigenous solution for battery recycling. We are confident this initiative will not only reduce our critical mineral imports but also set new benchmarks in clean-tech innovation globally,' said Utkarsh Singh, Co-Founder and CEO, BatX Energies.
The proposed facility will expand operations beyond the existing pilot unit to full-scale commercial production. The company said its process reduces dependence on imported recycling equipment and helps minimise the import of critical minerals.
The project is aligned with national goals under
Aatmanirbhar Bharat
, circular economy promotion, and reducing reliance on imported raw materials for energy storage systems.
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


Mint
an hour ago
- Mint
Hyperlocal Deliveries Fuel 300% Stock Rise for Shopee Owner Sea
In the battle royale of global e-commerce, the names are familiar and formidable: Amazon. TikTok Shop. Shein. Temu. But in Southeast Asia, home to 675 million people and a $160 billion online shopping market, the reigning monarch is an app the color of a traffic cone. It's called Shopee. And it's thriving. Owned by Singapore-based Sea Ltd., Shopee has pulled off one of the more improbable corporate comebacks in recent memory, sending its stock soaring more than 300% since the start of 2024. A key secret weapon is a little known logistics operation powered by an army of homemakers, students and retirees. And the help of some very large Ikea bags. That operation is SPX Express, a homegrown in-house delivery network that Sea spent years building in the shadows. While rivals like Inc. plastered ads across the city for Black Friday and TikTok Shop flooded feeds with flash sales, Shopee was busy rewiring the infrastructure of Southeast Asian commerce one community at a time. They're a familiar sight in Singapore. The retired 'uncle' in flip-flops, slinging parcels across a housing block in an ever-practical blue Ikea bag. Or an entrepreneurial homemaker busily sorting a makeshift Shopee kiosk beside the elevator. They're the human backbone of SPX Express, which now handles the majority of Shopee's several billion parcels annually. And Wall Street has noticed. Shopee's success has helped Sea inch toward a $100 billion market cap, on the heels of Singaporean banking giant DBS, the region's most valuable company. The stock, listed on the New York Stock Exchange, has soared 324% since hitting a low in January last year. Of the 41 analysts tracked by Bloomberg who rate Sea, 33 of them have a 'buy' recommendation on the stock. 'Sea's significant recovery was largely driven by growth in its e-commerce business, which was executed really well during the post-Covid period,' said Hussaini Saifee, an equity research analyst at Maybank Securities Pte., who rates the stock a 'buy.' In 2021, Shopee was facing a conundrum: demand was exploding — especially during the Covid pandemic — but its delivery pipeline was buckling under the pressure. Until then, Shopee had relied mostly on third-party carriers like J&T Global Express Ltd. and Singapore Post to navigate the logistical complexity of Southeast Asia: thousands of islands, alleys too narrow for vans, dirt roads more familiar to scooters than trucks. That changed almost overnight. As online orders more than doubled in 2021, Sea bet big on building its own logistics arm. During a 2022 Sea earnings call, Chief Executive Officer Forrest Li pledged to build up its logistics business, spending nearly $1 billion that year alone. Lowering the cost of delivering parcels will be 'key to long-term growth,' he said. It was a big risk during a difficult period. Sea had just lost almost 90% of its value from its 2021 peak. Investors were disillusioned about its money-making potential in a global tech rout, scrutinizing Sea's growth prospects after shoppers emerging from pandemic lockdowns started cutting back on online purchases. The gaming and e-commerce giant had cut about 7,000 jobs to try assuage some of these concerns. It also shuttered its e-commerce operations in some European and Latin American markets and said it would reduce expenses to cope. Read: Sea's Path to Profit Paved With Layoffs, Single-Ply Toilet Paper CEO Li brought in Hoirul Hafiidz Bin Maksom, a bespectacled 43-year-old former hospital operator, experienced in coordinating large local teams in a high stakes, time-sensitive, customer-centric environment. Over the span of two years, as Hoirul obsessed over shortening delivery timings and ways to bring down costs, Sea built up a network of delivery drivers, warehouses and thousands of collection points. The market share of its logistics operations in Southeast Asia, which was essentially non-existent in 2022, grew to about 25% in 2024, according to research firm Momentum Works. 'Covid was a great accelerator for us,' said Hoirul. 'There was definitely a gap in the services available for last-mile logistics, just because e-commerce was just growing too fast during Covid. So we had to do our part and solve this problem.' Today, SPX Express is a finely tuned operation. At midnight, sorting centers buzz to life. Parcels are unpacked, scanned, and routed via conveyor belts into color-coded plastic bags — blue, orange, green and purple — each representing a different part of the island. One such sorting facility can processes up to 400,000 parcels a day. With SPX Express, 90% of its parcels are delivered the next day in Singapore. In the rest of Asia, almost half of SPX Express orders were delivered within two days. But what's truly characteristic to Shopee begins after the parcels leave the warehouse. SPX Express' edge is in its intimacy. It's the fact that your parcel might be delivered by your retired neighbor, or the kid next door looking to earn pocket money. People like John, a 64-year-old who's been delivering in his neighborhood for four years, going up and down apartments in a quarter-mile radius to hand over hundreds of parcels every day. He does it for the money, sure — a little extra cash is always nice. But he also likes the community. 'I've made so many friends, I get to chat with elderly neighbors who welcome me into their home and witness milestones of so many families,' John said. Shopee scaled this model. Hoirul's lightbulb moment came while walking through his public housing estate last year. He noticed that neighbors were already informally receiving parcels on behalf of others. Why not pay them? This would be easy to set up, the parcels would be safe and SPX Express would be able to leverage the existing public housing infrastructure of Singapore, where more than 80% of the population lives. So Shopee started doing just that — setting up collection points in the very homes of the people who live in the buildings they deliver to. Shopee now has more than 3,500 of these sites, which also include shops and lockers, across Singapore. Some look like tidy mini post offices. Others are literally living rooms stacked with brown packages and a folding table. Pearlyn Tan and her husband, a delivery driver, run one out of their flat. She handles up to 80 parcels a day. At 30 Singapore cents per package , they earn enough to cover a few days of groceries each week. Then there's Diyana Scott, a TikTok influencer and mother of five, who turned to Shopee after losing her job earlier this year. Her whole family helps. Her kids rotate shifts and greet neighbors collecting their orders. 'I made new friendships with many mothers in the neighborhood,' Scott said. 'I love it.' 'Shopee's vibrant orange is plastered over thousands of touchpoints all across Southeast Asia — delivery trucks, parcel lockers and sometimes even on the back of motorbikes,' said Jianggan Li, founder of Singapore-based research firm Momentum Works. 'This level of visibility, coupled with the human touch, helps Shopee reinforce their presence in the fabric of life of locals; especially across Southeast Asia's diverse landscape and hard-to-reach places in the region.' By the fall of 2024, Sea's logistics arm was delivering a majority of its own packages. It also briefly surpassed J&T Express, according to Momentum Works. SPX is also partnering with other companies like Shopify to expand its logistics services. Ahead of Sea's second quarter earnings on Aug. 12, the company is forecast to post a record $5 billion in revenue, according to Bloomberg estimates. Its e-commerce arm is projected to account for 72% of sales, with value-added services including logistics estimated to contribute $799 million, up 14% from a year ago. Shopee's market share has jumped to 56% of $120 billion in gross merchandise value last year, according to Momentum Works based on the top four Southeast Asian e-commerce platforms. TikTok Shop and Lazada claimed 19% and 15%, respectively. But SPX Express isn't friction-free. Residents complain that they are using shared public spaces to sort parcels and local councils in Singapore often make them shift from one block to another. And the gig-like pay structure, with typical payouts of S$0.50 per parcel, mean workers often hustle longer hours to keep up with rising volumes. Also, while SPX may have briefly overtaken J&T Express in parcel volume, margins remain tight and SPX has yet to prove that it can win outside of Shopee's terrain as it looks to offer its logistics services to more companies. Meanwhile, TikTok Shop remains a formidable force with its tight partnership with J&T Express and deep-pocketed investment in the region. 'TikTok Shop's emergence was a concern for Shopee because they have the capital backing from ByteDance to take market share,' said Maybank's Saifee. 'Shopee's retention of its market share is linked to SPX Express, as well as increasing the assortment on their platform and bringing down prices by working together with sellers.' But it's clear that Shopee has become part of the social fabric in Southeast Asia. In Indonesia, SPX collection points operate out of warungs — small family shops that double as pickup depots. In Taiwan, they've been installed in convenience stores and shops filled with Shopee lockers. In Brazil, where Shopee has also expanded, the network is growing too. John, the retiree, has witnessed first hand how fast Shopee has expanded and isn't worried about the competition. The number of packages he delivers has tripled in four years. He knows his neighbors' unit numbers by heart and sometimes slips the package behind their shoe rack if they're not home. 'I just take things in my stride,' said John, hurrying off with two Ikea bags full of parcels. This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without modifications to text.


Indian Express
2 hours ago
- Indian Express
The ‘Turnberry system' – what the US' new global economic order looks like
Last week, Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor Sanjay Malhotra touted India's 'bright prospects in the changing world order' in the medium term, adding that 'opportunities are there for the taking'. But will India be able to get its hands on any of these opportunities? Turnberry, of course, is a Trump-owned hotel and resort on the western coast of Scotland where in late July the US President and his European Commission counterpart, Ursula von der Leyen, announced their bilateral trade agreement. As part of the deal, goods from the European Union (EU) will face a tariff of 15 per cent when entering the US. However, it did not end there: by 2028, the EU will buy $750 billion of American energy products and invest $600 billion in the US. The deal has been called a 'capitulation' and humiliating for the EU. According to Julian Hinz, head of Research Center Trade Policy at Berlin-based Kiel Institute for the World Economy, it was an 'appeasement' and abandoned the World Trade Organization's (WTO) principles. 'Under WTO rules, member countries must apply the same tariffs to all other members. Deviations are only permitted under free trade agreements in which both sides reduce their tariffs to zero. The current deal clearly violates these principles and sets a dangerous precedent,' Hinz warned on July 28, adding that Trump's strategy of 'pitting other economies against each other' had only been strengthened. Greer's New York Times column, however, made no bones about abandoning the WTO and its doctrines. According to Greer, the legacy of the Bretton Woods system lived on in the form of an arrangement dominated by the WTO he said was 'untenable and unsustainable' – while the US lost industrial jobs and economic security, others did not undertake key reforms. China, meanwhile, was the winner. But now, 'reform is at hand', with the US-EU deal 'oriented toward serving concrete national interests rather than vague aspirations of multilateral institutions'. Multilateral institutions such as the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund have been criticised for decades for their policy suggestions, especially when it comes to debt-laden developing nations, as shown by the Asian financial crisis of 1997 and the European debt crisis. Momentum to meaningfully reform them has gathered pace in recent years. Greer, however, has a more US-centric world order in mind. 'It took over 50 years from that first meeting at Bretton Woods until the creation of the WTO. It has been 30 years since. Fewer than 130 days from the beginning of the Trump Round, the Turnberry system is by no means complete, but its construction is well underway,' Greer concluded, calling the current round of global trade negotiations as the 'Trump Round' of discussions – a reference to the several rounds of talks held between countries that led to the formation of the WTO at the Uruguay Round in 1994. But what exactly is the Turnberry system? Going by Greer's column, the Turnberry system involves nations aligning on economic and national security interests and rebalancing trade in a 'more sustainable direction' such that the US' manufacturing sector is back on its feet. This, he said, warrants a 'generational project to re-industrialize America'. The era of the US getting other countries to lower their trade barriers by removing the tariffs that defended its own manufacturing sector is over; in its place, the removal of foreign trade barriers is being done 'while ensuring sufficient tariff protection at home'. This system also intends to enforce these new priorities in a far more telling manner than 'drawn-out dispute settlement process'. Should the US detect non-compliance, there will be swift retribution in the form of higher tariffs – the 'formidable stick' to the 'mighty carrot' that is the opportunity to sell your goods in the 'world's most lucrative consumer market', Greer said. Clearly, the Turnberry system is one which serves only one country. The US gets its pound of flesh in the form of re-industrialisation, while foreign companies get the opportunity to have access to the world's richest consumers. Or at least that's what the US government thinks. Leading academics have repeatedly warned that Trump's tariff war will not solve the country's problems. For instance, Robert Z Lawrence of the Peterson Institute of International Economics and a professor of trade and investment at Harvard University has said it is a 'fool's errand' to make the US economy go through a massive disruption just to create a relatively small number of manufacturing jobs. Moreover, dealing with bilateral deficits individually does not balance overall trade and without policies that cut American expenditure relative to its output, Trump's tariffs will only result in the shifting of its trade deficit from targeted countries to non-targeted ones, Lawrence has argued.


Time of India
2 hours ago
- Time of India
Amazon sellers linked to Pakistan's exploitative garment factories
Academy Empower your mind, elevate your skills A new report from the campaign group Labour Behind the Label (LBL) has exposed widespread labour violations in Pakistan-based garment factories supplying Amazon Marketplace sellers, as reported by the Business and Human Rights Resource investigation reveals routine exploitation, underpaid workers, and systemic abuse occurring in a country that has long turned a blind eye to workers' months-long investigation identified three sellers--Chums, Ice Cool Fashion, and A2Z 4 Kids--whose products trace back to factories in Pakistan , specifically Faisalabad, a city notorious for its poorly regulated textile industry. Researchers interviewed 40 workers, collecting harrowing accounts of forced overtime, wage theft, and inhumane working reported being forced to work well beyond legal hours. On top of their 8 am to 5:30 pm shifts, many are made to work two to four additional hours daily, often without the legally required overtime pay. Pakistan law mandates double wages for overtime, yet employers flout these regulations with impunity. Such blatant violations raise serious questions not only about factory management but also about Pakistan's utter failure to enforce labour worker, Hussain, told Dazed, "We are barely surviving. I live in a two-room house with my five children. I hardly manage my utilities on my salary, and we are living hand to mouth." Another worker, Abdul, reported a monthly income of just £86, supporting a family of seven. Their stories, as detailed in the report, expose a systemic collapse of labour protections in Pakistan's garment sector, where poverty-level wages, lack of education, and zero accountability are the norm, not the the scale of these violations, none of the three implicated brands responded to LBL's requests for comment. A Pakistani factory manager, however, dismissed the allegations, offering the same tired denial: "We will fight and prove our innocence." Yet the mounting evidence suggests to LBL, the real culprit lies in Amazon's reckless third-party seller model, which enables such exploitation while deflecting responsibility. Amazon requires sellers to sign agreements promising that goods are not made with forced or child labour, yet fails to actively enforce these commitments, especially in countries like Pakistan, where labour abuses are easy to hide and harder to prove."The fact is that Amazon has deliberately set up a business model that is creating this risk but is not addressing it," said Anne Bryher, LBL's policy lead. Campaigners argue that tiny fashion brands with hidden suppliers enjoy impunity while sourcing from places where human rights violations are ignored as a matter of national to Dazed, other platforms like Shein have already admitted issues in their supply chains and implemented corrective actions. Meanwhile, Pakistan continues to be a breeding ground for exploitative, profit-driven manufacturing, propped up by weak governance, poor regulation, and a culture of Amazon enforces robust audits and Pakistan faces real international pressure to reform, Pakistani factories will remain hubs of exploitation, fuelling global fashion with misery, sweat, and silence.