The company that wants to recycle all of Britain's EV batteries

RNZ News

14-05-2025

Batteries for electric vehicles are notoriously difficult to recycle.
Photo:
123RF
A company is trying to recycle all of Britain's electric vehicle batteries, in a bid to transform the energy sector to zero-carbon.
Batteries for electric vehicles are notoriously difficult to recycle, but growing demand for the rare metals they contain is leading to greater interest in retrieving their contents.
As the number of electric vehicles in circulation grows, so too will the demand for the rare metals needed for manufacture along with the number of batteries to be recycled, making the idea of self sufficiency attractive.
Altilium, a recycling firm based in south-west England, has been perfecting techniques to be able to retrieve as many elements from the old electric car batteries as possible.
It's technology uses nitric acid to extract metals from the batteries, which is then recovered and reused.
Altilium's finance director Sean Joseph told
Nine to Noon
the electric vehicle industry is growing, and with it, the demand for critical metals continues to rise.
As of the end of April 2025, there are around 82,500 fully electric light vehicles and 37,300 plug-in hybrids in New Zealand, according to the
Electric Vehicle Database
(EVDB).
Meanwhile, new EV batteries sold into the EU will need to contain minimum levels of recycled lithium, nickel and cobalt from 2031, with further increases in 2036, under the EU's Battery Regulations.
"Five years ago people were sceptical, to say the least, that there was a need," Joseph said. "We are a company that is really driven around the recycling and reproduction of these critical metals from waste-stream."
He said other countries looking to build and develop an electric vehicle and system are largely relying on China, which control an excess of 90 percent of the critical metals needed in their supply chain.
Altilium provides an alternative.
"When you produce a battery, the critical metals that go into that battery Giga factories [large-scale factories that produce EV batteries] have 30 percent waste of those metals as they scale up. So, there's a number of waste products that are created through this energy transitional battery manufacturing that we're committed to provide recycling solutions for."
Joseph said Altilium can extract an excess of 95 percent of the critical metals, including lithium, in the wastestreams and drive that right back to a new battery - so full "battery circularity".
This process is 20 percent cheaper than virgin mining, Joseph added.
Photo:
123RF
"I'd love to see a recycling industry in Australia or New Zealand, the challenge is that to make it successful, you probably need scale. The scale is probably not quite there yet in both Australia and New Zealand right now. Indeed, in some respects, Australia's lucky enough to have a lot of stuff they can dig out of the ground, and so there is a little bit of slow uptake and range anxiety as well," Joseph said.
"Over time, we'd love to be in Australia, but for the moment we are looking to solve the UK problem."
Altilium claims by 2040 a UK based battery recycling ecosystem could supply 50 percent of the critical minerals needed for domestic EV production.