Latest CRUX investor interview - start of something big, page-9

Hi @chobbo

Interesting article re BASF

You can see how quickly the landscape is changing in this exponentially zooming new energy world. Only a year or so ago you could read about the DRC with majors like BASF etc buddying up to the Chinese processors. The DRC is a simply hole in the ground for Chinese to corner cobalt, they must be wondering how it could have gone wrong, they would make it cheap, ask few questions, effectively cleanse/disguise, a simple one stop shop, what's not to like ?

Here's a (2018) Bloomberg article on the great Chinese secret weapon in the race to dominate the EV's of the world.

Back to BASF who quietly changed direction, not a Robinson Caruso in that regard, just about all Western battery interests now have a wary eye on that easy cobalt out of China.

In fact this article from last year was about the last BASF reference to the DRC, apart from the human cost of cobalt out of the DRC, they recycle zero of it, that will become a dirty little secret very hard to hide, no major brand wants to be tagged with that sort of publicity.

All the new speak is about recycling, battery makers are looking at effective credits for recycled contributions, its multi purpose and something you will happily be tagged with, in fact you can brag about it.

If one or more of the literally hundreds of cobalt users worldwide or even some of the dozen or so majors could find a serious volume, quality, ethical supplier who could also meet a recycled component mandate, they would they interested....right ?

March of this Covid year may be too far back to remember for some, however the industry players will have taken good note of Cobalt-in-Waste-Streams-Project.PDF It is important to note the Europeans are right in the middle of a process to legislate for a circular climate neutral battery, this is of particular interest for COB, a future producer who is actively looking in addition to its large cobalt resource to actually recycle cobalt out of waste tailings, which incidentally will be classified as recycled battery materials by both the European and US submissions.

Cheers
Phil.

Article from iisd on Sustainability and recycling of lithium and cobalt