WORKERS at a rural South Korean factory are busy extracting some of the world’s most coveted metals, used in the batteries that power electric cars.

But they’re not digging in the ground or refining ore. Instead, they are sorting through a pile of lithium-ion batteries from old mobile phones and laptops.

As China’s hunt for cobalt and lithium for electric vehicles pushes up prices and causes a global shortage of the key metals, South Korea is increasingly turning to such “urban mining” to recover cobalt, lithium and other scarce metals from electronic waste.

In 2016, the most recent year from which data is available, 19.6 trillion won (US$18.38 billion) worth of metals were extracted from recycled materials, meeting roughly 22 percent of the country’s total metal demand, according to a report by the Korea Institute of Industrial Technology.

SungEel HiTech is South Korea’s largest battery recycler. A decade ago, the company was at a crossroads as plasma TV panels, from which it extracted gold and silver, began to phase out.

Now it is part of a supply chain for some of the world’s major battery makers, including Samsung SDI and LG Chem.

Yi Kang-myung, SungEel HiTech’s president, said the shortage of mined metals had led his company to boost capacity by threefold this year. It plans to list in 2020.

“We are receiving phone calls from many who are showing interest,” Yi said.

“Major automobile companies are interested in our products,” he said, without naming the automakers. He added that battery companies and POSCO, a South Korean steelmaker, are interested in getting into the recycling business themselves.

The scarcity is unlikely to abate anytime soon. Over the past three years, South Korea’s imports of key metals for lithium-ion batteries have jumped, according to data from state-run Korea Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources.

In 2017, South Korea imported 3.5 million tons of nickel, up 2 percent from 2016. Cobalt imports rose 3.4 percent to 13,972 tons from a year ago.

Cobalt prices CBDO jumped to average US$87,615 a ton in March, about a four-fold increase from January 2016.(SD-Agencies)