R3 Lithium has begun operations at a 154,000-square-foot facility in Covington, Georgia, where it makes lithium from recycled batteries at a commercial scale. The company describes the site as North America’s first proven commercial-scale lithium carbonate recovery facility, running entirely on recycled feedstock, and it expects the plant to account for more than half of total US lithium carbonate production in 2027.
The timing matters. The United States imports most of its lithium and refines even less of it domestically, while demand from grid battery storage, data centers, electric vehicles, and defense programs keeps climbing. Recycling does not replace mining, but it offers a supply route that can move in months rather than the decade it takes to permit and build a new mine.
A restarted plant with an unusual pedigree
The Covington facility was not built from scratch. A previous owner invested roughly $150 million to construct the site and demonstrated commercial-scale recycled lithium production there in 2025. R3 Lithium acquired the plant in July 2026, after the earlier operator, Ascend Elements, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in April following a construction dispute at its Kentucky project, canceled federal grants and a slump in lithium prices.
R3 acquired the facility without liabilities and kept the leadership team that ran it. Chief Executive Linh Austin, who led Ascend through its bankruptcy filing, has more than 30 years of experience in energy businesses, including senior roles at McDermott International, BP and ARCO. Chief Technology Officer Eric Gratz co-founded Ascend Elements and holds 43 patents in battery materials and lithium-ion recycling. He also sits on the technology committee of the US Department of Energy’s Li-Bridge public-private partnership, which is run through Argonne National Laboratory.
The new owner closed a $15 million Series A round from investors including Integral GlobalTech Partners, TDK Ventures and Axial Partners. That money is earmarked for upgrading the existing lithium carbonate line. R3 also holds roughly $1 billion in signed offtake agreements, including a take-or-pay contract with commodities trader Trafigura.
What the plant actually does
The Covington operation combines two functions that most recyclers keep separate. Its shredding lines can process up to 30,000 metric tons of battery material a year, taking in both manufacturing scrap and end-of-life batteries and reducing them to black mass, the powder that holds the valuable metals inside a lithium-ion cell.
From there, the plant extracts lithium on site using a calciner-based crystallization and water-based precipitation process. The company says the line was the first in US history to produce lithium carbonate at 99% purity from entirely recycled content at production scale.
- Site size: 154,000 square feet in Covington, Georgia
- Shredding capacity: 30,000 metric tons of battery material per year
- Lithium carbonate output: 2,500 metric tons per year, with floor space for a second line of the same size
- Purity: 99%, from 100% recycled feedstock
- Byproducts: nickel, cobalt, manganese, and graphite, sold separately as concentrated metal oxide
Keeping shredding and refining under one roof removes the need to ship black mass to a refiner, often overseas, before the lithium can be recovered.
The process leaves a second product. Once lithium is stripped out, what remains is a concentrated metal oxide rich in nickel, cobalt, manganese, and graphite. R3 sells that material separately and notes the revenue can exceed what it pays for the feedstock itself. That gives the plant a way to stay economic even when lithium prices are soft, a weakness that helped sink the previous operator.
Domestic supply on a different clock
The strategic case rests on how little lithium the United States produces today. According to the US Geological Survey’s 2026 mineral commodity summary, Chile supplied 54% of US lithium imports in recent years and Argentina supplied 43%, leaving the country with net import reliance above 50% of apparent consumption. Domestic primary output comes from a single commercial brine operation in Nevada, and total US lithium production was estimated at roughly 610 metric tons in 2024, about 0.3% of the global figure.
The gap is wider in processing. Between 85% and 95% of global battery cell and component manufacturing capacity sits outside US and European borders.
Federal policy, through the Inflation Reduction Act and critical mineral designations, is directing money at closing that gap. But new domestic mines typically take seven to ten years to permit and more than 20 years from first discovery to first production. Recycled lithium does not carry that timeline, because the feedstock is already above ground. As Gratz put it, “Every battery already in service in this country is a lithium deposit. It is above ground, it is concentrated, and nobody has to dig for it.”
Demand is arriving first from the grid
The buyers R3 is counting on are not only automakers. Global battery storage installations passed 300 gigawatt-hours in 2025, reaching roughly 315 GWh, an increase of about 51% over 2024, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. The number of giga-scale projects entering operation rose to 46 last year from 17 in 2024. The International Energy Administration counted 108 GW of new battery storage deployed worldwide in 2025, up 40%, and expects around 353 GWh to be added in 2026, with data centers a structural driver of the growth.
That matters for lithium math. Each gigawatt-hour of grid-scale storage consumes roughly 880 tons of lithium carbonate. Global battery energy storage capacity is projected to grow sixfold between 2025 and 2030.
What comes next
R3’s expansion plan is deliberately modular. The company wants to build a network of lithium carbonate and black mass shredding facilities across North America and Europe, each made up of 5,000-metric-ton annual units deployed only after offtake agreements are in place. The approach lets it fund projects in stages and avoid concentrating capital in one large buildout. A second 2,500-ton line in Covington would double the original site’s capacity.
Trafigura, which has committed to buy output, frames the plant as a fix for a physical gap rather than a bet on a single technology. “Battery manufacturers, the Department of Energy, and OEMs are increasingly seeking reliable sources of domestic lithium,” said Tim Wood-Dow, a battery metals trader at the company. “R3 Lithium’s Covington facility helps address that gap in the physical supply chain by producing lithium carbonate from recycled feedstock on U.S. soil.”
Still, the 2027 projection deserves context. R3 expects its Georgia plant to supply more than half of all US-produced lithium carbonate next year. Given that domestic primary production was around 610 metric tons in 2024, that claim says as much about the small size of the US refining base as it does about the plant’s output. Recycling can become a meaningful slice of domestic supply quickly, but domestic supply itself remains a small fraction of what the country consumes.
The test for R3 is whether the Covington line can run continuously and profitably at a moment when lithium prices remain soft and the previous operator at the same site did not survive. If it can, the plant offers a template that depends less on geology than on logistics: collect the batteries, refine them domestically, and sell both the lithium and everything left over.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is lithium carbonate used for?
Lithium carbonate is a key input for lithium-ion battery cathodes, and it is also used in glass, ceramics and pharmaceutical applications. Battery demand now drives most of its growth.
What is black mass?
Black mass is the powder produced when spent batteries and manufacturing scrap are shredded. It contains the nickel, cobalt, manganese, lithium and graphite that were inside the original cells, and it must be chemically processed to recover those metals.
How much lithium carbonate will the Covington plant produce?
The site is rated at 2,500 metric tons a year, with space allocated for a second 2,500-ton line. R3 expects the facility to account for more than half of total US lithium carbonate production in 2027.
Can recycled lithium replace mining?
Not at current volumes. Recycled lithium carbonate is a supplement to primary production, but it arrives faster because the feedstock is already above ground and does not require new mining or foreign refining.
