Thirty miles east of Reno, Nevada, past dusty hills patched with muted blue sage and the occasional injury-lawyer billboard, a large concrete structure rises prominently in the desert landscape. When fully constructed, it will be a pilot for a business that entrepreneurs envision as a major facet of America’s future green economy: lithium-ion battery recycling.

Construction manager Chuck Leber points out bays where trucks will drop off batteries, and deep drains in rooms to catch leaking chemicals. He shows me a 2-ft concrete slab under the building—a hefty foundation so workers can move equipment and adapt the plant while refining the recycling process. Later this year, the first batteries will pass through the facility; the goal is to ramp up to handle 20,000 metric tons of batteries a year.

The 60,000 sq-ft plant owned by the American Battery Technology is an optimistic endeavor to address the inconvenient environmental downside of electric vehicles: their resource-demanding battery packs. It’s also a test of whether business leaders can live up to their promises to help build a circular economy—one in which materials are reused indefinitely, minimizing the need to continually pry more minerals from the earth.

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