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Metastable Materials: Refining India’s Battery Future
Articles- Aug 29,26
As battery demand rises, securing critical minerals is becoming a strategic priority. Ashlin Rajan highlights how Metastable Materials is building indigenous refining solutions to drive India’s circular battery ecosystem.
As electric mobility and energy storage accelerate, securing a reliable supply of critical minerals has become a strategic priority. While lithium-ion batteries power the transition towards cleaner technologies, their end-of-life management presents both a challenge and an opportunity, recovering valuable materials and keeping them within the economy.
Metastable Materials is addressing this challenge by developing a next-generation battery recycling and refining platform designed to recover critical minerals from diverse battery chemistries. Emerging from research at IIT Roorkee, the company is focused on creating a low-carbon, resource-efficient refining process that can support India’s transition towards a more resilient and circular battery ecosystem.
From research to refining
The journey of Metastable Materials began with a research challenge at the Extractive Metallurgy Lab, IIT Roorkee. The objective was to explore a simpler alternative to existing lithium-ion battery recycling processes. The research was subsequently published in scientific peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Sustainable Metallurgy and JOM.
In 2021, the company was founded to transform this research into a commercially viable technology. Since then, Metastable Materials has focused on developing a refining platform capable of processing lithium-ion batteries across different types, formats and chemistries.
Rather than treating batteries only as a source of black mass, the company’s approach focuses on recovering multiple valuable materials and converting them into usable forms for downstream industries.
Building circular supply chains
A sustainable battery ecosystem requires more than collection and recycling. The critical minerals contained within used batteries need to be recovered, refined and reintroduced into manufacturing supply chains.
Metastable Materials is working towards this closed-loop approach by sourcing end-of-life batteries and recovering materials including lithium, nickel, cobalt, copper, aluminium, steel and plastics. These recovered materials can support applications across industries such as automotive, stainless steel, ceramics, glass, casting and other manufacturing sectors.
As domestic battery manufacturing expands, the company believes these recovered resources can increasingly support battery-material supply chains.
For Metastable Materials, circularity extends beyond converting an old battery into a new one. It focuses on keeping critical minerals in circulation within the economy for as long as possible while reducing dependence on imported resources.
Low-carbon refining
The company’s refining process is built around improving resource efficiency and reducing external inputs. It has developed a low-carbon process where materials within the battery itself drive reduction reactions, enabling separation and extraction of valuable elements.
By applying principles from metallurgy, mineral beneficiation and conventional refining to battery materials, Metastable Materials has developed much of its associated processing equipment in-house.
This approach is designed to create a scalable refining system that can handle multiple lithium-ion battery chemistries while simplifying downstream processing requirements.
Quality precision
Recovering materials is only one part of battery recycling. Ensuring that these materials meet industrial requirements is equally critical.
According to Shubham Vishvakarma, Founder and Chief of Process Engineering, Metastable Materials, the company’s focus extends beyond recovery to delivering materials that customers can reliably integrate into their manufacturing processes.
Different applications require specific standards related to purity, elemental contamination, particle size and physical characteristics. Metastable Materials works with customers to develop product specifications and manages process controls and testing around these requirements.
Each production batch undergoes quality checks before supply, with elemental composition and contamination levels being key parameters. Customer qualification and performance validation remain integral parts of the company’s approach.
Industry perspective
India’s growing battery ecosystem will require a stronger domestic foundation for critical minerals. Vishvakarma highlighted that recycling cannot completely replace primary mineral imports immediately, but it can create an important secondary source of materials.
The minerals present in batteries remain valuable even after their operational life ends. By recovering and refining these resources domestically, India can retain greater mineral value within the country instead of relying solely on imported refined products.
The company believes that a combination of domestic mining, refining and recycling will be essential for building a more resilient critical-mineral supply chain.
Scaling commercial operations
Moving from laboratory research to industrial-scale operations has been one of the company’s biggest challenges. Battery waste is highly variable, with differences in chemistry, cell format and manufacturer creating complexity in processing.
Vishvakarma explained that scaling required solving multiple challenges simultaneously, including process validation, equipment design, material handling, safety, quality control, environmental controls, feedstock sourcing and supply-chain logistics.
Having demonstrated the technology and moved into commercial operations, the company’s immediate focus is increasing utilisation and expanding processing capacity.
Future vision
Metastable Materials is continuing to improve recovery rates, process efficiency and the range of battery chemistries and material streams it can handle. The company is also evaluating opportunities to expand its operational and technology footprint as it scales.
Its larger ambition is to strengthen India’s position in the critical-mineral value chain by enabling domestic recovery, refining and manufacturing capabilities.
As India moves towards greater electrification and advanced manufacturing, Metastable Materials aims to provide the refining infrastructure needed to keep critical resources within the economy and support the next generation of industrial growth.
Metastable Materials
battery recycling
critical minerals
lithium-ion battery refining
circular economy
battery materials recovery
sustainable metallurgy
EV supply chain
Ashlin Rajan
Shubham Vishvakarma
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