Nishchay Chadha, Ace Green Recycling — Cleaner Battery Recycling and the Case Against the Smelting Furnace

Battery recycling startup Ace Green Recycling: building a cleaner, modular alternative to the smelting process that's been polluting the industry for decades.

Mike Norton and Jackson Lyons sit down with Nishchay Chadha, co-founder of Ace Green Recycling — a company that's been quietly doing battery recycling differently since 2019, and is now building its first US facility in Texas.

Nishchay's path to founding a battery recycling company started at the bottom of an IIT engineering ranking list, took him through commodity trading in Singapore, global recycling operations, and a chance encounter with a technologist co-founder who'd spent six years developing a process to eliminate the smelting furnace entirely.

The result: a room-temperature recycling process, no toxic slag, organic food-grade chemicals - and a business model built on licensing and supply chain before anyone else thought that was the right order of operations.

In this episode:

• Why smelting is the defining problem of the battery recycling industry - and why most players haven't solved it

• How Ace Green eliminated the furnace and runs a room-temperature process that produces no toxic solid waste

• The Texas facility: Phase 1 at 30,000 tonnes per year, scalable to 150,000 tonnes - and why getting it operational is 90% of their current energy as a company

• Why Ace Green switched from NMC to LFP recycling two and a half years ago - before the rest of the industry caught up

• The uncomfortable truth about battery recycling investment: investors want billion-dollar spreadsheets, and that's pushed startups toward oversized plants that can't get feedstock

• Why nobody is a competitor in this space - and what it actually looks like to run a recycling business as a platform

• The human side of recycling: the children Nishchay saw working in global recycling operations, and why that's what actually drove him to start the company

One of the most grounded, opinionated conversations of Series 8.

Nishchay Chadha | LinkedIn(4) ACE Green Recycling, Inc.: Overview | LinkedIn