Who thinks about the metals inside their phone battery? Likely not many of us.

It turns out these tiny bits of cobalt, nickel, and other metals keep your phone charged, your car moving, and your smartwatch buzzing with notifications. The problem is, most refining of these metals doesn't happen in the U.S.

That's where Nth Cycle steps in. MIT News reported that this Boston-area company, co-founded by MIT's Desirée Plata, Megan O'Connor, and Chad Vecitis, uses something called electro-extraction to pull critical metals from waste.

As O'Connor put it, "America is an incredibly resource-rich nation, it's just a matter of extracting and converting those resources for use. That's the role of refining."

Here's the catch. About 85% of these metals are refined in China. O'Connor didn't mince words. 

"It's an economic and national security issue for us," she said. "Those materials are required components of multiple industries. Everything from our phones to our cars to our defense systems depend on them. I like to say critical minerals are the new oil."

So what's this technology all about? Vecitis first tested electrochemical filters to destroy contaminants in wastewater. Plata asked him if that approach could separate metals instead. Turns out it could.

Interestingly, the first idea wasn't even about electronics. O'Connor remembered wondering if metal could be pulled from mineral-dense wastewater left over from oil and gas drilling. But they soon turned to electronic waste, like old phones, electric cars, smartwatches, and stuff piling up in drawers and garages.

Most of this waste is ground up and shipped off to giant refineries overseas. These facilities melt everything down with heat, acids, and bases to pull out pure metals. 

Plata said, "Each of those acids and bases have to be transported as hazardous goods, and the process for making them has a large greenhouse gas and energy footprint. That makes the economics difficult to square in anything but huge, centralized facilities, and even then it's a challenge."

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Nth Cycle took a different approach. They built a portable refining system called The Oyster. Imagine a metal refining box that sits next to recyclers or manufacturers instead of shipping scrap across the ocean. It uses electricity, chemical precipitation, and filtration, not dirty fuels. Its first commercial system started in Ohio last year, already processing over 3,300 tons of scrap each year.

"Electro-extraction is one of the cleanest ways to recover metal," Plata said.

The Department of Energy saw promise in the idea early on. When Plata joined MIT in 2018, Nth Cycle entered its STEX25 startup accelerator. 

Plata said, "What's so important about being at a place like MIT is the entrepreneurial ecosystem and the 'tough tech' ethos of Cambridge."

Right now, it focuses on recovering metals from batteries. But O'Connor has bigger plans: "The only two places you can get those materials are from recycling and mining, and both of those sources need to be chemically refined. That's where Nth Cycle comes in."

So next time you're scrolling social media on your phone, think about the metals inside and how companies like Nth Cycle are working to keep them local, cleaner, and ready for your everyday life.

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