Western Nevada College receives $600k for lithium recycling workforce training hub

CARSON CITY, Nev. — A local college in Northern Nevada is one of three schools in the state to receive funding from the state to expand certain workforces.

Western Nevada College (WNC) will soon establish a workforce training hub at its Fernley campus thanks to a $599,999 award from the Governor’s Office of Economic Development (GOED).

“In our service area is the city of Fernley. There’s a lot of emerging industry there, and so we’ve been adapting our advanced manufacturing program that we developed for other industry partners to help with the battery recycling initiatives that’s going on,” President of WNC Kyle Dalpe said.

The training hub will create a local workforce for what industry leaders call the ‘lithium loop’, which refers to the mining and production of lithium locally in Northern Nevada, and then the recycling of those lithium devices once they’re made. The recycling stage is where this new workforce is needed to essentially close the lithium loop.

“As we’ve built up a big industry here of creating batteries, namely at the Gigafactory for all the Tesla products, now battery recycling and mining for lithium and extracting materials out of recycled batteries, whether it’s a car battery or a cellphone battery, that’s becoming an industry in and of itself,” Dalpe said.

The funding comes as Career Technical Education (CTE) schools increase in popularity in Nevada and across the country, with about 51% of Nevada jobs requiring a level of education above a high school diploma but below a bachelor’s degree, according to Dalpe.

“We have been talking quite a bit and regularly about how can we be more nimble and meet the needs of the state workforce. And community colleges can do that sometimes in weeks or months instead of traditionally years that we might have seen before,” Assistant Vice Chancellor for Workforce Development and Community Colleges at the Nevada System of Higher Education (NSHE) Natalie Brown said.

The other two Nevada schools that received funding are Great Basin College, which got more than $500,000 for mining training expansion, and the College of Southern Nevada, which got $1.5 million for an education and training center.