Circularity is at the centre of a battery recycling partnership between Quebec-based companies Nova Bus and Lithion Technologies.

Saint-Eustache-based Nova Bus, a manufacturer for Canadian and U.S. transit authorities, will have clients send end-of-life lithium-ion batteries from electric buses to Montreal-based Lithion, where up to 98 per cent of the critical minerals will be reused to make new batteries.

The batteries will be processed at the company’s first facility in Saint-Bruno-de-Montarville which can recycle 20,000 tonnes per year at full capacity, Marie-Line Paquet, external communications manager at Lithion, said in an email exchange.

Nova Bus manufactures frames for and assembles 40- and 60-foot buses at two factories in Quebec. While the firm offers buses across different fuel types (diesel, hybrid, compressed natural gas), it has been receiving more orders for its battery-powered Nova LFSe+, Christos Kritsidimas, vice-president of public affairs, legal and external communications, said in an interview with Sustainable Biz Canada.

Most of its tenders in Canada, such as hundreds for the Toronto Transit Commission, are for the Nova LFSe+ today, and Nova Bus believes the future is in battery-powered transportation.

As a member of the Volvo Group, Nova Bus is aspiring to become a more sustainable business that draws upon a circular supply chain. By partnering with Lithion, Nova Bus “can tell our customers, ‘we believe in this,’” Kritsidimas said. “So you know that the car that you are choosing is one that believes in a circular economy.”

Volvo’s circularity plans

Volvo, one of the world’s largest automakers, aspires to be a circular business by 2040. This entails heavily shrinking its waste and pollution, using more recycled materials and reusing parts. By 2030, the company aims to recycle or reuse 99 per cent of its waste.

With the help of battery maker Volvo Energy, Nova Bus searched for nearby lithium-ion battery recycling facilities that would help meet the goals, and found Lithion. Nova Bus staff toured the Lithion site when it opened in 2024, Kritsidimas recounted, and were impressed with what they saw.

The partnership was announced in December 2024 and is now in full effect.

Each Nova LFSe+ has between four and six 94-kilowatt-hour batteries, he added, with each battery having a lifespan of at least six years. The batteries are manufactured by German company Akasol.

Recycling batteries will mean less mining of new raw materials is required, Kritsidimas said of the environmental benefit.

Kritsidimas declined to offer an estimate of how many tonnes of batteries could be recycled annually, saying the number is difficult to predict.

How Lithion will recycle

Once a client informs Nova Bus it has expired batteries, Lithion will handle the transportation to its Saint-Bruno-de-Montarville facility.

The first step is extracting the critical minerals such as lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese and graphite in a substance called black mass through shredding, Paquet explained.

The black mass is then subject to a hydrometallurgical process that separates and purifies the valuable minerals. The metals can be sold on the market, while plastic and aluminum flakes and copper “are recovered and sent to partner facilities for further recycling,” Paquet said.

The remaining material that cannot be recycled is incinerated, safely disposed of, or treated as industrial waste.

Lithion is selecting a site for the hydrometallurgical facility, but a timeline for the project is not yet available, Paquet said.

Other than electric vehicles (EVs), Lithion also accepts batteries from electronics and electric mobility vehicles such as bikes and scooters.

“We want this to be a very, very long-term partnership,” Kritsidimas said.

The not-so clean side of batteries

While EVs are widely viewed as a way to reduce carbon emissions, the batteries that power them have a high environmental cost, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Climate Portal.

The mining to dig up the minerals used to make the batteries is often heavily polluting, resource intensive and scars the landscape. Battery manufacturing is energy intensive, so operations not set in clean electrical grids are indirectly emitting greenhouse gases.

Recycling lithium-ion batteries is a way to offset some of these impacts. Reusing the critical minerals means less mining is needed. Quebec’s electricity is some of the cleanest in the world, so Lithion’s operations will not be very carbon intensive.

Nova Bus is focused on ethical sourcing, Kritsidimas said, and will continue with and expand on ways to reduce resource consumption and waste, including refurbishing its vehicles.