Few countries know mining like Chile. But the fastest-growing deposit is not in the Andes: it is in office drawers, importers' warehouses and electronic-scrap containers. It is called urban mining, and it consists of recovering the metals we already extracted once.
Grades from another planet
A natural cobalt ore can grade below 0.1%. A tonne of phone batteries contains on the order of 10% to 20% cobalt in its cathode material, plus lithium, nickel, copper and aluminium. In mining terms, the end-of-life battery is high-grade ore that has already been crushed, transported and concentrated. It only needs processing.
The new resource map
- Today Chile generates about 120 tonnes of end-of-life batteries per year.
- By 2030 it will be close to 4,800 tonnes per year, driven by electric buses and cars, scooters and BESS systems.
- Long-term studies project hundreds of thousands of cumulative tonnes by 2050.
And unlike a traditional deposit, this one grows on its own: every electric car sold today is urban ore in 10 or 15 years. You can explore the full scenarios on our market page.
What is missing: infrastructure
Chile has the growing resource, the regulation (EPR law) and large-scale mining's demand for local inputs. What it lacked was the plant. That is exactly the space Ecobaterías is building: the first scalable lithium battery recycling platform in the country — and the first company of its kind in Latin America — with products already validated at Codelco.