• Tabono Investments and ACE Green Recycling have announced a joint venture.
• The joint venture will see the building and operation for two battery recycling facilities in South Africa.
• It’s estimated that roughly 2 500 tons of battery waste enters landfills in South Africa each year.

Now more than ever South Africans are reliant on battery power whether that be penlight batteries that power torches or lithium-ion batteries that power our smartphones and notebooks.

As per energy solutions firm Uniross, the average South Africa uses six battery operated products everyday ranging from clocks, to TV remotes, to toys. The problem, as Uniross notes, is that folks aren’t disposing of batteries correctly. The long and short of this is that roughly 2 500 tons of hazardous waste is being improperly discarded in landfills each year.

While Uniross has made efforts to reduce this alarming amount of waste, this is a serious problem that needs to be addressed.

To that end, Tabono Investments – a South African-based investment firm – has announced a joint venture with ACE Green Recycling. The joint venture will see the construction and operation of two environmentally sustainable battery recycling facilities in South Africa.

According to its website, ACE Green Recycling claims it uses proprietary Scope 1 emissions-free technologies to recycle multiple chemistries of lead-acid and lithium-ion batteries. The firm is able to turn the waste into reusable battery materials.

The battery recycling firm has operations in the US, the UK, India and Singapore with an eye on expanding into emerging markets.

“We are committed to ensuring emerging markets benefit from our clean battery recycling solutions,” ACE Green Recycling’s chief executive officer, Nishchay Chadha said in a press statement sent to Hypertext. “Combining our expertise with Tabono will ensure development of safe and sustainable closed-loop solutions for battery materials within South Africa.”

Co-founder at Tabono Investments, Liran Assness said that as South Africa embraced green energy, the reliance on lead-acid and lithium-ion battery usage had increased.

Adding to this Tabono Investments co-founder Reon Barnard said, “With dedicated environmentally friendly ways of recycling batteries, the world can leverage valuable materials like lead, lithium and cobalt, and power our future in a less harmful way.”

The investment firm brings its vast experience in the minerals and industrial services industries across Botswana, Mozambique, Tanzania and South Africa to the partnership.

The facilities planned as part of the joint venture will built from scratch as part of a so-called greenfield project. The facilities ownership will be split with ACE Green Recycling holding a majority 51 percent ownership and Tabono Investments owning the remaining 49 percent.

With the rise of electric vehicles and our ever growing appetite for more powerful smartphones and tablets with larger batteries, recycling these materials is more important than ever.

We highly recommend you dispose of your batteries at specially designated bins such as those found at retailers around South Africa. This goes for other forms of technology as well, don’t throw your old notebook into your regular trash, take it to a specially designated facility or collection point.

[Image – Pixabay]