You may not know it, but there's a lithium-ion battery powering your life today. From your laptop, to your smartphone, to your electric vehicle, these batteries have basically taken over the globe. But like everything else in the world that requires consumers, the result is tons and tons of lifeless batteries left to rot after their use is up.

Thankfully, a new company is working towards breaking these batteries down and extracting a whopping 95% of their useful and valuable material for recycling and reuse. And thankfully, the investments keep coming in.

Recycling plants in Rochester, New York and in Canada now have the ability to save tens of thousands of tons of old batteries thrown away annually, removing their waste while helping recycle them, basically creating their very own battery recycling world.

The company, named Li-Cycle, which uses the periodic table's call sign for the metal lithium, claims that their "Spoke and Hub" personal recycling method is incredibly cost-effective, which means battery manufacturers can afford their recycled material made from the old batteries.

Regardless of a battery's size or shape, it can be broken down by a mechanical process that leads to two types of raw materials. One is the 'line of cathode and anode waste' that comes in a black powder consisting of lithium, cobalt, aluminum, nickel, copper, and graphite. The other is scrap aluminum and copper that comes from the conducting or insulating foils.