The big picture: Countries that don't mine their own lithium have two options when supply gets tight: pay whatever the market demands, or figure out how to reuse what they've already got. Japan is trying to lean more toward the latter, and one major breakthrough may help with that. A facility in Fukui Prefecture has figured out how to extract a whopping 90% of the lithium sitting inside dead EV batteries. That's around double what such operations previously achieved.

Behind the breakthrough is JX Metals Circular Solutions, a subsidiary of one of Japan's largest non-ferrous metal companies. While it was announced back in April 2025, it really started grabbing headlines this month after some Japanese publications revealed the actual process at the company's plant in Tsuruga.

Tadashi Nakagawa, the facility's vice president, told NHK that the team achieved its goal by rethinking the chemicals and methods involved in extracting lithium from spent battery cells.

The process starts with old batteries being separated and burned to strip away non-metal components. What's left gets crushed into something called black mass. This is essentially a powder packed with recoverable metals. From there, a water-based chemical treatment called hydrometallurgy pulls the lithium out.

One clever distinction in this new process is that the recovered lithium hydroxide actually replaces a chemical traditionally used during refining. This cuts the carbon footprint by about 40% compared to older methods.

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For Japan, this breakthrough is especially important since the country has so far imported virtually every bit of mineral it needs for its batteries. That includes not just lithium, but also cobalt and nickel. A lot of the refining has historically gone through China.

Japan has been trying to find a way around this. A new law taking effect this year will require manufacturers and importers to collect and recycle small portable batteries from the likes of phones, vapes, and power tools. The government wants recyclers to hit 70% lithium recovery by 2030, so that 90% number is already well ahead of schedule.

That said, Japan isn't the only country pursuing lithium recovery. In the US, Redwood Materials – the recycling company founded by former Tesla CTO JB Straubel – says it's already recovering 95% of lithium from the equivalent of about 250,000 EVs per year.

In Japan's case, though, the biggest bottleneck right now isn't the technology. It's actually getting dead batteries to recyclers in the first place. Only about 14% of end-of-life lithium-ion batteries in the country currently make it through official collection channels. Many retired EVs actually end up getting exported, making those valuable metals inaccessible. Solving this problem is now more important than ever.