JX Metals Reaches 90% Lithium Recovery to Cut Japan's Battery Mineral Dependency

Japanese non-ferrous metals group JX Metals has unveiled a refined hydrometallurgical process capable of recovering close to 90% of the lithium contained in spent lithium-ion batteries, a figure that ranks among the highest reported worldwide. The breakthrough was disclosed by NHK World on April 7, 2026, in a report filmed at the JX Metals Circular Solutions plant located in Tsuruga, Fukui Prefecture.

The announcement carries strategic weight for a country that imports almost the entirety of its lithium, cobalt, nickel and rare earths, with most of the upstream refining historically routed through Chinese facilities. Tokyo has framed this dependency as a national security concern and now treats end-of-life electronics as a domestic mineral reserve, an approach often described as urban mining. Reaching a 90% recovery rate at industrial scale would directly reduce Japan's exposure to foreign lithium suppliers and to the price volatility of the international carbonate market.

The new process starts with the calcination of used batteries inside dedicated furnaces, a heat pre-treatment step designed to remove plastic casings, electrolyte residues and other non-metallic components. The remaining material is then crushed and refined into a highly concentrated black mass containing nickel, cobalt, manganese and lithium. This black mass is dissolved in an aqueous solution and processed through a hydrometallurgical route that separates each metal through controlled chemical reactions.

The key innovation lies in the reagents used during the purification stage. JX Metals Circular Solutions replaced the conventional sodium hydroxide pH regulator with lithium hydroxide derived from the recovered lithium itself, a substitution that improves product purity and pushes the lithium recovery yield close to 90% at laboratory scale, nearly double the rate achieved by older industrial routes that rarely exceeded 50%.

The Tsuruga site is already the largest lithium-ion battery recycling operation in Japan and currently operates high-purity nickel sulfate and cobalt sulfate recovery lines, alongside a high-purity lithium carbonate facility commissioned in April 2023. According to the company, validation of the new process for mass production is scheduled to begin at Tsuruga in April 2027, marking the next step toward a true closed-loop recycling chain in which materials extracted from waste batteries return directly into the cathodes of new automotive cells.

The scale-up faces several structural obstacles. Official collection rates for end-of-life lithium-ion batteries in Japan remain around 14%, and a significant share of used Japanese electric vehicles is exported abroad, sending valuable metals out of the country before they can be processed domestically. Fire risks linked to damaged cells complicate logistics, and the diversity of battery chemistries, ranging from NMC to LFP, makes automated sorting difficult. A new 2026 Japanese law will require manufacturers and importers to collect and recycle small portable batteries from mobile phones, vapes and power tools, with public-private targets aiming for a 70% lithium recovery rate and 95% for nickel and cobalt from storage batteries by fiscal 2030.

In the United States, Redwood Materials, founded by former Tesla CTO JB Straubel, processes the equivalent of 250,000 electric vehicles per year and reports an average recovery rate above 95% across the combined critical battery metals, including lithium, nickel, cobalt and copper, supplying recycled feedstock directly to Panasonic, General Motors, Volkswagen and Toyota. Independent estimates from BloombergNEF are more conservative on lithium specifically, retaining a recovery rate of around 80% for lithium against 95% for cobalt and nickel, which places the JX Metals 90% figure for lithium alone among the strongest reported industrial benchmarks.

For Japan, the success of the JX Metals process could reshape the medium-term lithium balance. Domestic demand is projected to reach roughly 100,000 tonnes of lithium and 20,000 tonnes of cobalt per year by 2030, and the Japan Research Institute estimates the local battery reuse and recycling market could be worth around 2.4 trillion yen, equivalent to about 16 billion US dollars, by 2050. Other major Japanese players are moving in parallel, with Sumitomo Metal Mining planning new metal recovery plants in 2026 and JX Advanced Metals targeting an annual extraction volume of 30,000 tonnes of nickel, cobalt and other materials by 2035.

Until mass-production validation is completed, the breakthrough remains a laboratory and pilot-scale achievement, and its real impact on global lithium flows will depend on the ability of the wider supply chain, including automakers, dismantlers and trading houses, to deliver enough end-of-life batteries to the Tsuruga plant and to future facilities operating the same technology.