The Japanese carmaker teamed up with Japan Metals & Chemicals Company to establish the process in mass production at a recycling plant. It is hoped that it will begin to extract rare earth metals from nickel-metal hydride batteries from Honda hybrid vehicles as early as this month.
According to Honda, the process will be a world first as part of a mass production recycling plant. The purity of the recycled rare earth metals is expected to be as high as those that are newly mined.
Previously, Honda had been using a heat treatment on nickel-metal hydride batteries while also recycling the nickel as a raw material of stainless steel. However, the new process will allow for extraction of potentially more than 80 per cent of rare earth metals and is expected to be expanded in the future to a variety of additional used parts.
