The Chemist Mining India's Dead Batteries

BENGALURU — In a converted machine-tool shed on the city's eastern industrial fringe, Devika Rao holds up a sealed jar of fine black powder and says, with the flatness of a chemist describing the obvious, that she is looking at money. The powder is black mass — the crushed, sorted guts of dead lithium-ion batteries — and inside it are nickel, cobalt and lithium that India currently imports almost entirely from abroad.

Rao, 38, is the founder of Lohum-rival startup Anant Materials, and her wager is one of timing. The first big cohort of Indian electric two- and three-wheelers, sold from 2019 onward, is reaching the end of its battery life. The scrap is coming whether the country is ready or not.

Anant exists to be ready. Its pilot line processes about 2,000 tonnes of end-of-life cells and manufacturing scrap a year into battery-grade metal salts. The plant Rao is now financing would do ten times that.

From a London lab to a Bengaluru shed

Rao spent eight years at a materials-science group in London, working on the unglamorous chemistry of separating metals from solution. She could see, she says, that the West was building battery recycling for a problem it did not yet have — Western EVs were too new to be dying in volume — while India had the opposite mismatch coming.

She came home in 2021 with a thesis and very little else. The early months were spent driving to scrap markets in Delhi and Chennai, where informal recyclers were already cracking open battery packs with hammers and leaching them in open acid baths — recovering some metal, poisoning groundwater and losing most of the lithium to waste.

That informal sector, she realised, was both her competitor and her best argument. It proved demand for the scrap existed; it also showed regulators exactly what they did not want the industry to become.

Everyone talks about mining lithium in the ground. India's richest lithium deposit is the pile of dead scooters in every city's scrap lane. We just have to be cleaner than a man with a hammer and a bucket of acid, Rao said.

The hydrometallurgy bet

Anant's process is hydrometallurgical — dissolving the black mass and selectively precipitating out each metal in solution — rather than the pyrometallurgical smelting that dominates older recycling. Hydromet runs cooler, uses less energy and, crucially, recovers lithium, which high-temperature smelting tends to lose into the slag.

Rao claims recovery rates above 95 percent for nickel and cobalt and around 90 percent for lithium, producing carbonate and sulphate salts pure enough to sell back to cell makers. Those figures, if they hold at commercial scale, are the difference between a viable business and a subsidised one.

The unit economics turn on input price. Anant pays for scrap by metal content, and when global cobalt and lithium prices crash — as they did through 2024 and 2025 — the value of recovered metal falls with them, squeezing margins on a plant that cost the same to run regardless. Rao has responded by signing toll-processing deals: she charges a fee to recycle a manufacturer's scrap and returns the metal, insulating Anant from the commodity swing.

Policy as a tailwind

India's Battery Waste Management Rules, which impose extended-producer-responsibility obligations and recycled-content targets on battery makers, are the regulatory wind at Rao's back. They force producers to ensure a rising share of their batteries is collected and recycled, and to buy recycled material — creating, on paper, a guaranteed market for exactly what Anant makes.

On paper is the operative phrase. Rao says enforcement is uneven, the certificate-trading system for recycling credits is thin, and large producers still find it cheaper to under-comply than to pay a formal recycler. The rules have created a market; they have not yet made it reliable.

Her funding reflects that ambiguity. Anant has raised about $24 million across two rounds, led by a Mumbai climate fund with strategic money from a battery cell maker that wants secured recycled supply. Investors, she says, love the thesis and ask hard questions about whether the scrap volumes will actually flow to formal players rather than the hammer-and-acid lanes.

The race against informal recyclers

That is the real contest. India's informal recycling network is fast, cheap, cash-based and everywhere; it pays scrap dealers more than a compliant plant can afford because it skips environmental controls and taxes. Every battery it captures is one Anant does not get.

Rao's counter is to plug into the formal supply at the source — signing collection deals directly with fleet operators, e-commerce delivery companies and the original battery makers, so that scrap is contracted before it ever reaches an open market. It is a less romantic strategy than out-competing the informal sector on price, and a more realistic one.

Whether India builds a clean, circular battery industry or simply relocates the world's e-waste problem onto its own groundwater depends, in some part, on whether founders like Rao can scale before the scrap wave fully arrives. She thinks she has about three years before the volume becomes a flood. The plant she is financing has to be running before it does, or the metal — and the contamination — goes to the hammer.