battery-recycling
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Edward Shaffer
Dr. Edward O. Shaffer II is the CEO and founder of Advanced Battery Concepts, a Clare, Michigan company he started in 2009 to reinvent the 160-year-old lead-acid battery instead of chasing lithium. His patented GreenSeal bipolar architecture strips cost, lead and weight out of large-format storage while keeping the batteries fully recyclable, and it has been licensed to battery makers around the world including Crown, Clarios, EnerSys, Exide, Trojan and Monbat. An MIT-trained materials scientist and former Dow Chemical R&D manager, Shaffer argues that energy storage only scales when it is economically, socially and environmentally responsible - all three at once.
Jamal Burki
Jamal Burki is the co-founder and CEO of Renewance, Inc., an Elmhurst, Illinois company that manages industrial and grid-scale batteries across their full lifecycle - installation, monitoring, decommissioning, repurposing, and recycling. A former Motorola telecom engineer turned energy-storage operator, he built Renewance in 2015 with two ex-GE Energy Storage colleagues to solve a problem few were watching: what happens to the millions of batteries powering the clean-energy transition once they wear out. Under his leadership the company has commissioned and serviced over 20 gigawatt-hours of storage, decommissioned more than 100 megawatt-hours, and built RenewanceConnect, an AI-assisted platform for battery asset management and regulatory compliance.
Brendan Smith
Brendan Smith is the co-founder and CEO of SiTration, an MIT spinout commercializing a tunable silicon membrane that recovers critical metals like copper, cobalt, nickel and lithium from mining waste and spent batteries without the mountains of chemicals the old way demands. A materials scientist who came to MIT from Canada in 2013, he turned a desalination-lab discovery into a venture-backed company that has raised roughly $14.4 million and partnered with mining giant Rio Tinto. He runs the company from a 11,000-square-foot pilot facility in Watertown, Massachusetts.
Lukas Hackl
Lukas Hackl is the co-founder and CEO of Aepnus Technology, an Emeryville, California startup building electrolyzers that turn sodium sulfate waste - a salty byproduct piling up across the EV battery supply chain - back into the sulfuric acid and caustic soda that battery makers have to buy. The technology grew out of his UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory PhD work on electrochemical water desalination. After hearing the same waste complaint on road trips from California to Canada, he and co-founder Bilen Akuzum turned a laboratory curiosity into a company that emerged from stealth in 2024 with $8 million in seed funding led by Clean Energy Ventures.