Lithium-ion battery recycling center set to open in Chester County

CHESTER, S.C. (QUEEN CITY NEWS) — There’s a new battery recycling plant in Chester County.

Princeton NuEnergy recycles lithium-ion batteries from electric vehicles, and electronics. They also use batteries to store energy generated by solar power.

The recycled material employees gather at the site near the Chester Golf Club will be reused in new batteries for electric vehicles.

“All the technology that you currently use to recycle and build the thing reclaimed those various materials, it’s a fairly dirty process,” said Robert Long, Chester County’s director of Economic Development. “This technology uses high-plasma energy, and high temperature. A lot of people see some horror stories like with a thermal runaway of an electric vehicle, is in a car crash or something and it catches fire. That’s not the case here.”

Longtime neighbor Nate Smith isn’t fond of the county’s newest national company. He believes lithium-ion materials are dangerous to people and the environment.

“Being that it’s a relatively new technology and it’s tied to the EV market and they’re not selling as many EVs as they thought they would,” said Smith. “And I’m afraid that this facility might be flooded with batteries. In Chester County, it could be sitting on a ton of batteries because they’re not moving vehicles. And from what I read, the problem is stories, these batteries, and large facilities, that’s where these fires break out. That’s what concerns me.”

Smith says he doesn’t want what’s happened in France and South Korea to happen in Chester.  Nearly two-dozen workers died from a manufacturing facility fire in the latter.

Long says the initial feedstock is not car batteries, it’s batteries for laptops. The batteries are rejects, part of battery components and the cathode that didn’t quite make it through the quality control process.

They’re going to take that, clean it up, use their technology, and put it back into the supply chain, taking away the electrical charge.

“Without electric charge, there is no hazard of it catching fire or causing any sort of thermal runaway,” Long explained. “The long-term plans do include recycling EV batteries as part of their long-term plans. But there is layer upon layer of safety protocols that are really above and beyond the industry standards.”

The batteries will be mostly discharged by the time they get to the plant. They’ll go through an additional security step to ensure the batteries are good for use.

“The way the batteries are stored until they’re recycled, it’s something that’s just layers upon layers of safety protocols at the end of the day,” Long said.

Several county council members have already toured the company’s pilot production line in McKinney, Texas. County leaders gave the company a significant tax incentive to get here.

Long says the approval process for the fee-in-lieu tax incentive will begin at the next county council meeting.

They also received state income tax credits and other incentives to take root in Chester. County council members also awarded a $500,000 rural infrastructure fund grant to the project. Princeton NuEnergy, founded in 2019, will employ 41 people to run the facility.

“I don’t think it’s worth 40 jobs to put everybody’s safety at risk,” Smith said.

He says neighbors weren’t notified of the plant coming to Chester until the county announced the new partnership.

Smith says that is not transparent enough for him.

“I feel like once these projects, once the public gets involved, it’s almost everyone I talk to is like ‘No, I can’t believe they’re doing this to us. They’re throwing us under the bus again,’” Smith said. “And it hurts because I talk to a lot of local business owners who don’t have any tax breaks or any incentives, and they’re struggling to get by. Yet here we are going to give a big tax break to a company … it might be a great thing, but it also could be very risky as far as safety.”

He plans to discuss the issue with Chester County Council at the next meeting.

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