South Korea-based heavyweight LG Electronics saw mixed results in its 2024 sustainability report, but continued to make progress toward 2030 goals while forming high-profile partnerships in both Asia and the U.S.
In a press release, the company reported progress toward its 2030 goals, collecting 532,630 tons of used devices from 91 locations in 56 countries. That’s up significantly from 462,441 tons in 2023, which itself was a dip from 497,425 tons in 2022, according to the report.
In all, LG Electronics has collected a total of 5.01 million tons since 2006. The company aims to recover a total of 8 million tons of used electronics from 2006 to 2030.
Collected volumes of e-scrap were down slightly for the year in several regions, including North America. But they grew in certain regions, and nearly doubled in Latin America. Tons collected were as follows:
Europe: 124,089 (+22% from 2023)
South Korea: 125,138 (-1%)
North America (U.S., Canada): 28,334 (-7%)
Asia (Japan, India, Australia, Singapore): 151,774 (+13%)
Russia: 92 (-99.1%)
Latin America (Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Peru): 95,905 (+87%)
South Africa: 7,298 (flat)
Advances in the battery recycling space
In May 2024, LG Electronics began partnering with the Korea Environment Corporation and E-Circulation Governance to recover metals from small-scale secondary batteries, to help reduce the country’s dependency on imported volumes. Although recovered volumes were mostly lower on the year, the 2024 amounts were three to four times higher than in 2022. In 2024, LG recovered the following volumes of metals (in kilograms):
- Cobalt: 336 (-9% from 2023; +287% from 2022)
- Nickel: 2,439 (-10%; +275%)
- Lithium: 168 281 344 (+22%; +205%)
- Manganese: 168 (-52%; +295%)
Stateside, sister company LG Energy Solutions recently announced a partnership with Toyota Tsusho to build a joint venture plant in North Carolina to extract black mass from batteries – the mixture that contains metals and is used to produce battery anodes and cathodes.
Scheduled to start up in 2026, the new plant will have a maximum annual processing capacity of 13,500 tons of scrap batteries. In the initial stage of the joint venture’s operation, LG Energy Solution will supply scrap generated during the production of EV batteries for Toyota Motor. LG Energy Solutions makes lithium-ion batteries for EVs, mobility, IT and energy storage systems.
LG also conducts the customer-facing campaign Battery Turn to recover used vacuum cleaner batteries and encourage consumers to participate in recycling programs. In the five campaigns since 2022, LG collected about 200,000 batteries, weighing about 90 tons, from about 116,000 participants. In May this year, LG expanded the program to include batteries from robot vacuums.
Growing use of recycled plastics in products
LG used 36% more recycled plastics than the previous year, extracted from collected e-scrap. The company aims to use a cumulative 600,000 tons of recycled plastics between 2021 and 2030, and as of 2024 it has used 188,000 tons. Other recycled plastic metrics included:
- Use of recycled plastic: 74,079 tons (+36% from 2023; +225% from 2022)
- Progress toward 2030 target: 31% (+12 points from 2023; +21.2 points from 2022)
During the year, LG Electronics also introduced 0.71 kg of recycled plastic into the external back cover of a TV model, and increased the use of recycled plastic in an air conditioner model by 0.37 kg or 27%.
