India, Aug. 6 -- When Anupam Kumar, co-founder and CEO of clean tech company MiniMines, talks about sustainable and efficient battery recycling to extract lithium, cobalt, manganese, and nickel for re-entry into the supply chain required for Li-ion cell manufacturing, he means it. Kumar is a chemical engineer and has worked at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre where he used to recover uranium, cobalt, technetium and nickel from deactivated waste. "I was working onto something similar to what we do right now in terms of heavy metal recovery," he says.

At the core of this discussion is MiniMines patented Hybrid-Hydrometallurgy (HHM) process that works across battery chemistries, as Kumar and chief technology officer (CTO) Arvind Bhardwaj e...