Transcript
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Broadcasting from Washington, DC, This is insiders guide to energy.
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This episode of Insiders Guide to Energy EV miniseries is
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Paua Helps your business transition to electric vehicles by simplifying charging, managing payments and optimizing your charging data.
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Welcome to the Insiders guide to Energy EV miniseries with me today is Niall Riddell. My co-host Niall. What are we gonna be talking about today?
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So this is a topic which I kind of started my career in. We're going to be talking about battery recycling and recovery of materials out of the electric vehicle battery ecosystem. And we have Raffaele Nacchiero here to talk to us about this. Do you want to introduce yourself, Raffaele?
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Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. I'm very happy to tell you our story. The story of our innovatives.
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That that arabat.
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And how did this all begin? What is the story?
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OK, our innovative startup Arabat from Italy. Yes, I am Italian.
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Our setup was born.
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In 2020, so during the pandemics, when my friends and colleagues and I.
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Created this technological intuition and business idea. What business idea? Well, we have generated a new conceptual idea for setting up a business by using the resources of our territory.
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So the biomass we have, so we have.
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Created a setup that uses the biomass such as organic waste for example, simple beautiful orange peels or vegetable byproducts to solve a global challenge, that of the disposal of battery waste and.
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That are dangerous waste. Just think that one simple battery can emit other than 100.
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Toxic gases starting from Co very, very polluting for environment and toxic for human beings. So we have started from this idea and we have created the team and the first thing that we have done was.
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Not to telling this idea to the world.
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Firstly, we have talked with the the University of our city. We are in a pool, you know, S Italy, the the city of Portland. If you if you know. And in this city we have contacted the university professor. His name is his name is Matthew Francavilla that is.
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The coordinator of a very important laboratory, the Staff Facility center, one of the most relevant biomass valorization labs in all Europe.
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Yeah. And when we have told him our this crazy idea, you know, conjugating linking biomass and biological dimension to the electrical transition or very crazy idea, we have told this to this professor and he.
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Was very happy to hear this type of idea from by a very simple guys. Yeah, we we were.
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In that year, we were a simple university students. Yeah. Our team is composed of by two management engineers, me and Giovanni, 2 economies Vincenzo and Leonardo Rena and one scientist, materials engineer Leonardo Pinetti genius team.
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So we have presented ourselves to this university professor and we have asked him, Professor, we have this idea. We want support from from you. And since we can do very important things together.
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And the professor has early was early agreed with us, and from the since the the the, the next day we have worked in his laboratory to make concrete this technological intuition. This is the background of our story.
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A team from nothing that were linked by university experiences or cultural.
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Associations experiences we had in fact a cultural association such as Syrian emigre that developed a cultural projects linked to the sustainability and circular economy that are very important topics for us so.
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This is the background of our story and in 2022, so last year we had established the business subject, the the corporate, the setup and then we have gradually developed our technology and our concrete business project.
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So what exactly happens with biomass to make it?
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Take a battery and recycle a battery. I mean so I I get that you're taking two good things or hoping for a good outcome. But what exactly are you doing?
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Yeah. Our innovative technology called Aramat is a green hydrometallurgical proxy.
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That uses organic acids such as citric acid and pretreated biomass such as orange pills to recover critical raw materials from spent batteries. More precisely, our technological our technology.
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Is composed of three different phases. The first one corresponds to a pretreatment of these batteries, where input batteries entered into this phase, and by using an equipment we can recover copper.
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Aluminum and we can produce black mass. Yeah, in the recycling field, this concept, that of black mass is very important. What is black mass black mass is the black powder of batteries that include all the high value raw materials such as nickel.
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Manganese. Cobalt.
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Lithium, our first phase, so is a very simple, simple mechanical pretreatment. Then there is the second phase, the most innovative one, our green leaching biomass based leaching where the black mass produced previously.
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Enter it into this reactor. The leeching reactor where there are.
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Water, citric acid or other organic acids and these biomass mix deriving from pretreated fruit or vegetable waste and in this phase we activate our chemical treatment that present.
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Very low temperature.
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Not lower than.
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Grease. It's a very important feature in the recycling field and with very reduced time, our leaching time is not over than one hour. If supported by a parallel mechanical.
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Supporting process, so that's that's it. This is our second breaching green leaching phase and the final phase.
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Is the selective precipitation phase where we activate a pH changing mechanism to recover nickel and manganese, then cobalt and finally lithium lithium carbonate.
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And I.
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I want to highlight that our lithium carbonate is produced in this phase by capturing CO2 from environment. So a third important sustainability feature. That's it, that's our Arabic process.
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That is incredible.
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We my background meant that I spent a bunch of time recycling nuclear fuel and they used very concentrated acids in in closed containers with platinum based vessels and all sorts of crazy stuff, whereas you basically kind of described you crush up a battery, you dissolve it in some orange juice at a low temperature.
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And then you recover the important materials out of it as genius. I love it. Where have you got to on this journey? Is it in a little beaker, in a lab, or is this pilot scale? Or are you able to mass produce these facilities yet?
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Yeah. During the last year, we have validated our technology at a laboratory scale through the support of University of Florida. Then this year we have done our technological scale up with the support.
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Of some Canadian partners. In fact, last September I was in Canada with my.
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With my team to to do play industrial and operative tests of our technology, what we have done, we have replicated our technology that was already validated at a laboratory scale and we have replicated it.
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On our on our relevant environment, we have done over than 10 small green leaching tests on hundreds of grams of black.
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Mass. Then, during the same experience, we could validate the technology on at a an operative scale. In fact, we have replicated it by using over than 10 of kilograms. So a very preindustrial.
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Scale and the last days we have received the 1st.
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Of these brain dustrial experience, and we are very happy to say that our green leaching efficiency rates are very, very high. We can talk about for example of 95%.
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Of efficiency of leaching on lithium, that's a very important result in this recycling fee.
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When when the process is done and you've gone through each of the three steps you described, is there a slurry or some sort of byproduct that that needs to be dealt with that that has toxic material that didn't get used again?
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Our process is includes these phases that are less pollutant and we are working to complete the circle to reach the recovering.
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Rate of 9090% of the input battery. That is a very, very important goal.
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And for example, we are working on the reuse of the wastewater to reuse it from the end of the process to use it at the beginning of the first phase to reuse this wastewater for the battery discharge. So we are working on several different.
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Ideas to make better our process that is already sustainable and circular and now?
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We and obviously the raw materials and by paradox of our process.
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Will be reinserted into the market for the sale to car makers, battery producers or companies from very different production sectors that need these raw materials. For example, to do buildings to create boats.
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Or other sectors.
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And then you you mentioned orange quite a bit, orange peels and and and and natural acids when this goes up to scale. So if we're, if we turn the clock ahead and say you guys are wildly successful 5 or 10 years from now and there's a number of batteries there, do we have orchards of oranges being grown just for this use or will there be?
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Enough oranges there.
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Yeah, this is a very important point.
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First of all, I have to say that our process so our patent our technology includes includes the use of of very validated very different biomass types of biomass orange.
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And the orange we can use vegetable waste. We can use other different fruit and vegetable typologies. This is very important since our process since to be very flexible for the use of biomass and for the geographical.
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Use of our future.
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Since we can use our industrial process in Italy, in Apulia, where we are full of oranges, or we can use it in in Florida, where they they are full of oranges, but not only we can use the same process with a very different.
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Masks, for example. In Canada, there are more vegetable or in India full of lemons and so on. So it's it's a very advantage of our technology at this point. And finally, I have to say the.
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The quantity of biomass that is necessary to activate our religion is not very high. We use a very convenient, very effective rate battery biomass, so it's it's a scalable technology.
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So the the potential volume of batteries we're going to have to handle in the future once they've been through cars and a second life could be quite substantial.
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If you're at the stage where you can handle 10 kilos of black mass, I'm guessing that an average electric car now must be producing 56700 kilos, and then you need to do that at a real scale. When might we expect to see you able to operate at a sort of a more industrial scale? What's the timeline for your next steps towards that?
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Production of that process.
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Yeah, this month is very important for our organization for about since we are talking with two different industrial players for two different industrialization projects with the American partners. We are talking about.
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A joint venture.
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For the setting up of a new for the pretreatment phase and we are talking with an Italian multinational for the scale up of the second phase. So of the green leaching phase. So we will work on these two.
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Great ways on the on the these two different parallel directions to reach the industrialization goal by the end of 2020.
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So that's our timeline goal.
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That's a very impressive to get it to 2024 and I presume you've got a lot of steps to go through classically industrial scale up. You know the reason for going through those steps is to discover problems. Have you found challenges so far in in terms of scaling from lab to, you know, pilot plant?
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Usually there are several challenges or potential barriers, barriers, the industrialization scale up is always the most difficult challenge of every deep tech and clean tech startup.
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Like arabat for example, the one of the most relevant barriers is related to the permitting to the the obtaining of all the permits in terms of environmental standards and.
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Local government authorizations.
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But we are very.
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Happy to say that our startup is supported from the local government of Apulia. Since we were incubated in the first years from a regional entrepreneurship program. So we have their support and now we are working.
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To close our first investment round with the.
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The an Institutional Investment Fund to support the authorization process in the future, since we can have institutional players in our equity or in our collaborative.
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Relationships and I want to highlight that our competitors, some of them have tried to make faster the the approval of the industrialization.
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Project in Italy.
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But the local governments of the some regions of Italy have denied their fast track approval, so there are problems in this and but we are Italian, we are very sustainable. Very. We have a very circular project I'm sure.
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We won't have the same problems, I hope.
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Do do you anticipate controlling these facilities or licensing this this technology out?
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Very important question. Our goal is to control the plants. The industrialization, at least in the regions and territories that we can control directly like Italy.
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Or other similar regions, but we can be all.
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Open to we can open to discuss potential licensing models with very specific geographical areas. For example, in the last in the last last year, we were contacted by.
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Potential partners that were interested at to receive the license of our technology. So it's not a closed topic. This we are very open to do to do different things. But our main goal is the control of the plants.
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So you briefly mentioned the idea that you might have competitors. So one of the things I'd be very interested in if I was an investor would be why is your process superior to others and what is the market currently like for people that are offering this kind of battery recycling service?
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Yeah. Our we, we believe our technology is superior in terms of efficiency and sustain.
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For the first feature, our technology includes a very important numbers of savings in terms of energy. We use very low temperature than our competitors and we use very.
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Leaching time very low bleaching times, so we can save money, time and energy for this fact. So efficiency feature and for the sustainability feature.
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Well, we use oranges. We use biomass, we use the most sustainable and circular boxes in the recycling field.
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And this is important. I want to add this is important for for receiving incentives, public incentives and institutional support. It's not only a green and environmental characteristic, it is related to very important economics too.
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So this economics one is right. Exactly what I was thinking because your process is using fairly simple organic natural materials. Do you also have a capital cost saving because actually your plant manufacturing is likely to be lower cost than a high pressure high temperature process?
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Yeah. Now we are studying all the cost structure or the potential cost structure of our plant. So we are studying the CapEx, the classical CapEx and OpEx, yeah, in terms of OpEx, we believe our process can be.
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Very, very.
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Cost effective than competitors in terms of CapEx where we are talking about an industrial and chemical treatment plant. So the CapEx are high, but by using and adopting our strategy that of joint venture.
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That of technological scale up of the second phase, we aim to reduce them by starting with battery sourcing and preparation, and then by industrializing our leaching phase.
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So you you talked about pretty industrial process, although everything sounds friendly and not super energy inefficient, does this need to take place in a super industrial area or are there odors that we're going to figure out or is this something that a city would welcome in in a more light industry area?
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Yeah, we are talking about a very deep tech project, very industrial project. So we imagine that these type of plant will be related to the industrial areas of the cities of the world. So we
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And now, for example, we we are seeing some opportunities for land and buildings in the industrial areas of our region. So that's it.
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So, so Chris and I were thinking about this earlier and one of the things we're interested in is the market scale. Clearly, there will come a time when we have a lot of batteries that we need to manage. And therefore, there'll be a big market for this. But is there a market demand yet or are we a little bit early for that market demand?
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The market.
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It is a very the battery and recycling market is very interesting to tell something about them. Financial Times had published something related to this and presented very interesting numbers.
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For this they uh they tell about the need for recycling of manufacturing scraps.
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And scooters and other electric devices batteries in this decade. So this decade, 2020, 2030.
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Is the decade of the recycling of scraps and electric devices matches the next decade to 30 to 13, and so on will be the decade of the EV batteries electric vehicle batteries. This is important.
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To highlight, since now the the the.
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These are not very, very distributed and massive in Europe or or in America too, so the amount of batteries that can be recycled is not enough from cars. So now if the business.
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Of batch of car batteries, cycling cannot be very profitable, but next decade.
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And explosion, we will become for this. So we will have lots of car batteries in the streets, in our cities. So our strategy is aligned is aligned with these points we want to.
00:26:52 Speaker 4
Open the plans for recycling are very intelligent battery chemistries. Lithium but.
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We choose the support of our partners. We aim to do the pretreatment and battery preparation for very.
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Different products and waste. And then we will be ready for the recycling of every type of batteries, car batteries too.
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So as we move towards that decade of EV battery recycling, do manufacturers have an obligation to recycle or plan the recycling of their batteries as I buy, you know, an automobile or something today, so are the OEM's and folks actually planning for and legally liable?
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For maintaining the entire life cycle of these batteries that were getting deployed today.
00:27:51 Speaker 4
Yeah. Today institutions of Europe are developing some interesting normative tools to create the so-called extended producer.
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Responsibility. This concept is very important for everyone that produce and recycle batteries, for example, and every company, a car battery company has the.
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Needs to to create a secure and safe and sustainable destination for the batteries that they create and use. So thanks to this principle, the recyclers like.
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But can do commercial agreements with this type of companies where the recycler receive a fee.
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Euro dollar for tons of battery that it can receive. In fact, the Arabat's business model is based on two different revenue lines. The first one is based on the offer of this service, the disposal of service.
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Where we receive batteries and we are paid for receiving them. But the other revenue line is obviously related to the say of all the raw materials. So we can recover by using our innovative technology.
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So there's a raw feed stock coming in batteries, you get a payment, you process it and you put it.
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Out the back.
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We've noticed that there's some changes happening within the battery technology that we're deploying in vehicles and and in micro mobility. Do you have a limitation on the kinds of battery you can accept?
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Or do you?
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Modify your chemistry to handle different types of battery.
00:30:06 Speaker 4
Yeah, our technology is good for every lithium battery category.
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We are worked especially with the so-called LCD or batteries that are the batteries from laptops or smartphones, but we are sure our technology works very well with other different battery chemistries. In fact, in Canada we have tested.
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Our technology on a very heterogeneous.
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A black mass from different lithium batteries and our leaching particular leaching works very well. We have reached over the 90% of green leaching efficiency of lithium and other high performances for the other raw materials. But I want to add that.
00:30:58 Speaker 4
Our strategy go over this. Yeah, our strategies is based on a collaborative relationship with our partners to set up.
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Business that can accept other battery chemistries too, not only the lithium one, why this? This is a very relevant strategy to defeat our competitors that instead are focused only on the lithium batteries.
00:31:33 Speaker 4
So we are working to make the orange dream concrete. Yeah, the orange Dream is a lot of our top orange related to the orange piece.
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And so on.
00:31:47 Speaker 3
So, Rafael, you've talked about the technology you use, the work you're doing to scale up this, the opportunity it presents, but who are you as a team? What is the mix of skills you have and do you have all the skills you need to be able to bring this technology to life?
00:32:04 Speaker 4
Yeah. Our team is complete and heterogeneous with very different skills. For example, I'm a management engineer.
00:32:17 Speaker 4
And PhD student in mechanical and management engineering where I do research projects related to the supply chain management. So that's my field. That's my research topic. So I I studied several years.
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The dynamics of supply chains related to resilience, circular economy, sustainability, disruptions, management and these topics. That's my background.
00:32:53 Speaker 4
There are another management engineer engineer, Giovanni Nicolis, that is more focused on the operations and logistics management. So supply chain and logistics and operations are very important for every tip tech startup. Then we have two.
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Economies 2. Leonardo, I mean.
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Chance so that that have skills related to marketing and sales. So social media management, marketing and green marketing and so on. And Leonardo instead skills related to green finance, accounting and other topics. So the economics part of arabat.
00:33:37 Speaker 4
And finally, we obviously have the scientist Leonardo Binetti, is our materials engineer.
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That has achieved a PhD in engineering in University of Edinburgh, so a very complete team with very international experiences.
00:33:59 Speaker 4
And but the secret, in my opinion, the secret to setting up every business is the enthusiasm.
00:34:09 Speaker 4
That is a very important concept that derives from ancient Greek.
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Where and the intro inside and tails that is God. So a God inside and this is the most important secret to setting up every business and every goal in in professional lives and business too.
00:34:33 Speaker 2
So one thing you've mentioned through the interview a few times is.
00:34:38 Speaker 2
You you spent time there. You've got some proof of concept there. Italy to Canada, it's kind of a little air gap. Let me understand how, how and why.
00:34:49 Speaker 4
Why Canada? Yeah, we have. That's a very interesting point when we have created our set up our project, we need support, OK, we wanted to create.
00:35:09 Speaker 4
The first relationships, the first partnerships with potential industrial players.
00:35:16 Speaker 4
But in the first time, we haven't received any attention from local industrial players from Italian industrial players. At the beginning, everyone told us you are very you are too young.
00:35:36 Speaker 4
You are too crazy for this idea of biomass and battery. You are not ready for an industrial ambitious project.
00:35:48 Speaker 4
So what I I I did was to taking LinkedIn.
00:35:56 Speaker 4
OK, the social media and I used it to contact potential international players and I've searched Canadian man, Canadian entrepreneur, Canadian manager and I told him.
00:36:17 Speaker 4
Our beautiful story and particular story, our technology, our business vision and he was very.
00:36:27 Speaker 4
Happy to hear this from an Italian guy and just think that one month later this this Canadian.
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Guy was went to Italy, so he went to Montreal, Paris, Paris, Paris and he went to Forja, our small city, to talk with us of business, science research and a better future.
00:37:02 Speaker 4
And from that moment we have created a very important collaboration that has.
00:37:10 Speaker 4
Has started in a very formal and beneficial way.
00:37:16 Speaker 3
What a fabulous story. The Canadian meets the Italian to use some oranges to recycle batteries. You've taken us on an incredible journey through the process that you're developing, which is clearly hugely pioneering.
00:37:30 Speaker 3
And the challenges you're going to face as we move towards an ability to recycle batteries, I'm sure our listeners are gonna absolutely love listening to this story. Thank you for taking the time to talk to us.
00:37:44 Speaker 2
For our audience, we hope you've enjoyed this episode as much as we did. It was a fantastic episode. I enjoyed hearing about the technology, hearing about the vision, and this young companies plan to change how we recycle. If you enjoy this content, please don't forget to subscribe.
00:38:00 Speaker 2
Follow us on YouTube. Share us with your friends and add comments and we will get responses. We look forward to seeing you again next time on the insiders guide to Energy EV miniseries. We'll talk to You then bye bye.
