Worcester Business Journal

18 Worcester Business Journal | October 31, 2022 | wbjournal.com F A C T B O O K T E C H N O L O G Y & I N N O V A T I O N Central MA Award Winners will be revealed on November 9th THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS THIS YEAR'S FINALISTS ARE: • Ace Chimney Solutions - North Brookfield • Dog Dayz Grooming Salon - Worcester • Harbro Auto Sales & Service - Whitinsville • McGriff Trucking - West Boylston • Men Won Plumbing and Drain Services - Worcester • Property Management Inc. - Worcester • Simply Orthodontics - Worcester • Webster Five Cents Savings Bank - Auburn • Worcester Railers Hockey Club – Worcester The 2022 Central Massachusetts Awards for Marketplace Excellence winners will be announced at a ceremony set to take place at 4:30 pm on November 9th at The Manor Restaurant in West Boylston. Advance tickets are $20 and can be purchased by calling 508-552-0366. Fastest-growing Greater Worcester employment industries, over the long term Employment Employment Industry 2021 2030 % change Accommodation, including hotels and motels 754 2,141 183.95% Primary metal manufacturing 119 260 118.49% Miscellaneous store retailers 1,130 1,940 71.68% Motion picture and sound recording industries 223 371 66.37% Religious, grantmaking, civic, professional, and similar organizations 1,655 2,612 57.82% Sporting goods, hobby, book, and music stores 567 891 57.14% Administrative and support services 10,382 16,235 56.38% Construction of buildings 2,647 4,103 55.01% Administrative and support and waste management and remediation services 11,802 18,015 52.64% Accommodation and food services 15,478 23,400 51.18% Food services and drinking places 14,724 21,259 44.38% Transit and ground passenger transportation 1,318 1,901 44.23% Broadcasting (except internet) 118 167 41.53% Food manufacturing 983 1,383 40.69% Construction 11,569 16,253 40.49% Museums, historical sites, and similar institution 483 678 40.37% Specialty trade contractors 8,176 11,400 39.43% Other information services 324 440 35.80% Social assistance 12,561 16,959 35.01% Amusement, gambling, and recreation industries 1,592 2,104 32.16% Personal and laundry services 2,244 2,878 28.25% Real estate, rental, and leasing 1,851 2,373 28.20% Waste management and remediation service 1,420 1,780 25.35% Merchant wholesalers, nondurable goods 2,798 3,497 24.98% Real estate 1,165 1,440 23.61% Furniture and home furnishings stores 700 863 23.29% Securities, commodity contracts, and other financial investments and related activities 593 714 20.40% Agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting 643 774 20.37% Warehousing and storage 2,269 2,730 20.32% Truck transportation 2,644 3,154 19.29% facility in Kentucky, received $480 mil- lion in grants from the U.S. Department of Energy to build out its operations, is constructing another $43-million facility in Georgia, and in October partnered with the South Korean battery material company EcoPro Group to use Ascend's recycled materials. Yang's research that started Ascend was about trying to preserve cathode ma- terial like cobalt, nickel, and manganese, which are extremely expensive raw ma- terials to mine and source. At the time, Wang said, lithium was cheap, and some of it could be recovered aer the other metals were extracted from the battery to be recycled and used again. Now, though, the price of lithium has skyrocketed. e price of lithium has risen from $6,128 per metric ton in August 2020 to $59,928 per metric ton in August 2022, accord- ing to a report by Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. Wang, though, was already on his way to exploring how to extract nearly 100% battery-grade lithium from recycled bat- teries, and this year he published a paper on it in an issue of the science journal Green Chemistry. Why all of this research? Because as Continued from page 17 the EV market continues to grow, there will be a greater need to create an independent supply chain of the materials used for batteries. While re- newable energy can be created without burning fossil fuels, it does take rare materials and elements to store that energy for use. With that comes a cost, and as Wang sees it, the cost will grow unless we figure out how to harness the materials we've already harvested. "When you consider the production ramping up initially, you need lots of batteries, lots of battery materials, but you don't have that many battery materials to be recycled," Wang said. "Initially, you need loads of new mate- rials, but eventually if the spent battery is the same with the new batteries, in principle you don't need new materi- als. But also those are critical elements – it's a critical resource– eventually those will be used up if you don't recycle." An inflection curve of adoption Lithium-ion batteries aren't going away. e once humble battery is becoming more and more important as we try to move away from fossil Continued on page 20 Notes: Certain industries are subsets of larger industries, such as chemical manufacturing being a subset of the manufacturing industry. Data collected on Sept. 27, 2022. Source: Massahcusetts Dept. of Labor and Workforce Development

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