Pioneering Australia’s Battery Recycling Future.
As battery adoption accelerates across homes, businesses, and transport, the question of what happens to batteries at end of life has never been more urgent. Inno Energy Group — through our innovation arm PCI Green Technologies — is at the forefront of solving it.
Australia’s Battery Challenge
Millions of lithium-ion batteries are sold in Australia every year — in electric vehicles, solar storage systems, consumer electronics, and industrial equipment. The vast majority of these batteries currently have no clear recycling pathway, creating a growing environmental and economic challenge.
Battery materials, including lithium, cobalt, and nickel, are valuable finite resources. When batteries end up in landfills, those materials are lost forever — and can cause significant environmental harm. Australia needs a homegrown recycling industry, and it needs it now.
Where PCI Green Technologies Comes In?
We are an industry partner of the ARC Training Centre for Battery Recycling. This national initiative, funded by the Australian Research Council and administered by Adelaide University, is building the technology, workforce, and industry standards needed to make large-scale battery recycling a reality in Australia.
PCI Green’s Partner Investigator, Mr Daniel Hu, works directly alongside the UNSW research team on Sub-project 8.1 – bringing our proprietary PCI material technology from commercial product into the frontier of battery recycling science.
PCI Materials: The Science Behind Safer Batteries
High-power lithium-ion battery modules for large-scale energy storage must simultaneously keep operating temperatures low while dissipating significant heat from internal electrochemical reactions. Excessive heat reduces battery performance, accelerates degradation, and increases safety risks — including the risk of thermal runaway.
Conventional cooling systems consume additional power, require complex designs, and can experience coolant leakage, limiting their long-term reliability. Our Phase Change Inhibited (PCI) material technology solves this with a passive cooling approach that exhibits ultrahigh thermal conductivity compared to conventional systems.
🌡️ Uniform Temperature Distribution
PCI materials achieve a more uniform temperature distribution across battery cells, greatly reducing the risk of thermal runaway and improving overall safety.
⚡ Improved Efficiency & Lifespan
By maintaining optimal operating temperatures passively, PCI technology improves the efficiency of energy storage systems and significantly extends battery lifetime.
📦 Scalable Modular Design
Sub-project 8.1 is exploring modular PCI cooling designs, supported by multiphysics modelling and data-driven optimisation, to create scalable solutions for large-scale energy storage applications.
The ARC Training Centre for Battery Recycling
The ARC Training Centre for Battery Recycling brings together three Australian universities — the University of Adelaide, UNSW, and the University of Wollongong — and six industry partners to tackle battery recycling across five interconnected research themes:
- Pre-treatment & second-life management — safe collection, transportation, storage, and sorting of spent batteries
- Recycling spent batteries to materials — recovering valuable metals and materials efficiently and cleanly
- Resynthesizing materials for new batteries — turning recovered materials back into high-performance battery components
- Designing batteries for ready recycling — rethinking battery design so that recycling is built in from the start
- Industrial standards & next-gen LIB practice — developing the regulatory and standards framework Australia needs
The Centre’s goal is clear: zero battery waste to landfill, a profitable onshore recycling industry, and a highly skilled Australian workforce to sustain it.
Building a Circular Economy for Energy
The batteries we sell and deploy today should not become tomorrow’s waste. We believe the full lifecycle of a battery — from manufacture and deployment through to second life and recycling — is our responsibility as an energy company.
Our involvement in the ARC Training Centre reflects a long-term commitment: not just to selling world-class battery storage products, but to ensuring those products are part of a sustainable, circular system that benefits Australia’s environment and economy.
Want to Know More About Our Battery Recycling Work?
Whether you’re a potential industry partner, researcher, or customer interested in sustainable battery solutions, we’d love to hear from you.