Latest news with #Altilium
RNZ News
14-05-2025
- Automotive
- RNZ News
The company that wants to recycle all of Britain's EV batteries
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.
RNZ News
14-05-2025
- Automotive
- RNZ News
recycle all of Britain's EV batteries
technology 35 minutes ago 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. The majority of ev battery recycling is carried out in China, with smaller amounts done in the US and Europe. But 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. The countries where materials such as cobalt, lithium and nickel are mined are limited, making the idea of great self sufficiency attractive. Altilium- a recycling firm based in south-west England that has been perfecting techniques to be able to retrieve as many elements from the old electric car batteries as possible. Altilium's Finance Director, Sean Joseph, joins Kathryn to talk about what the company is hoping to achieve.
BBC News
07-04-2025
- Automotive
- BBC News
Battery recycling company in Devon gears up for expansion
The UK's first electric vehicle (EV) battery recycling plant has secured millions of dollars of investment to help scale up its Plymouth-based Clean Technology employs 50 staff across three locations in the city and Tavistock. The firm said it had pulled in $20m over the last 18 months from a variety of private investors, and was looking to expand its said it would reduce the UK's dependency on mined raw materials, improve energy security and make electric vehicles even greener in the future. The company's process recovers critical metals, including lithium, from old EV batteries, which can then be used in the production of new chief operating officer, Christian Marston, said: "In old EV batteries and production scrap from giga-factories, we have that strategic asset already in the UK and companies like Altilium can take those waste streams, recover these critical minerals and put them back in to build new batteries to electrify everything and allow us to get to net zero". A recent recruitment drive has seen specialists in chemical and mechanical engineering from across the UK join the business, the company said it was actively engaging with schools, colleges and universities in Plymouth to foster Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) opportunities for early-stage careers. 'Exciting expansion plans' Emily Hatcher, head of people and culture at Altilium, said: "Our teams across R&D, engineering and business operations are driving advancements in clean technology every day, building a truly circular economy for critical battery materials."We plan to continue accelerating and have exciting expansion plans ahead."As well as its operations in Devon, Altilium is also looking to build one of the largest EV battery recycling plants in Europe on Teeside. The company is aiming to supply 50% of the lithium and nickel needed for EV batteries in the UK by 2040.
BBC News
05-04-2025
- Automotive
- BBC News
Where EV batteries go to die
Batteries for electric vehicles are notoriously difficult to recycle, but growing demand for the rare metals they contain is leading to innovative new ways of retrieving them from used power cells. I am standing in a lab where batteries go to be reborn. But first, they must be shredded. What arrives here is a dark powder called "black mass" – a substance derived from pulverising batteries almost to oblivion. Each particle is less than a millimetre across. Staff working for Altilium, a recycling firm in the south-west of England, are now tasked with extracting crucial materials from this pitch black disorder. The powder contains some plastic and steel from the battery which must be separated out, but there are also sought-after materials such as lithium, nickel, cobalt and graphite. These are the prized ingredients with which the lab workers here can make a new battery. As the climate crisis intensifies, the world is electrifying. Countries are increasingly shifting away from fossil fuels towards renewable sources of energy including solar panels and wind turbines. Homeowners are installing heat pumps in the place of old gas or oil boilers. And drivers are increasingly buying electric vehicles (EVs) powered by batteries. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), nearly one in five cars sold in 2023 was electric. This was a 35% year-on-year increase compared to 2022 and brought the number of EVs on the world's roads to 40 million. The problem with this is that demand for batteries, and the materials required to make them, is soaring. "One of the big challenges is that the minerals are kind of concentrated in certain places," says Christian Marston, president and chief operating officer of Altilium. Over half of the world's nickel comes from Indonesia, while two-thirds of all cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo – both of which have ongoing human rights issues associated with mining operations. That's why there's now a race to find other ways of sourcing those key minerals. Recycling batteries is one option, but is also notoriously difficult. Staff at Altilium, however, say they've cracked it. Altilium's facility is squirreled away in the unassuming English town of Tavistock. Getting here involves driving across the windswept expanse of Dartmoor, sometimes slowing to a crawl to wait for sheep to get off the road. When I arrive, I find Altilium's building on a mundane industrial estate with a tyre shop across the road – but what they're cooking up inside is anything but mundane. In the lab I find racks of glass cylinders linked together by tubes, all filled with brightly coloured liquids – mostly vivid blues and greens – running the length of the room. Nearby, a technician wearing a white lab coat and safety glasses studies the workings of these contraptions. This is Altilium's solvent extraction lab, where staff retrieve sought-after battery ingredients from the black mass they process here. It all began in late 2020, but got off to a slow start. "We lost two years because of Covid," says Marston ruefully. But in mid-2022, he and colleagues took out a lease on the Tavistock facility – at the time, an "empty shed", says chief technology officer Ben Wickham. The team built several laboratories, and began developing their recycling process on a small scale. Three years later, they are commissioning a larger plant just outside nearby Plymouth, which will supply recycled materials to battery manufacturers. The company is one of just a handful of firms around the world that are developing methods for recycling batteries sourced from old EVs. Such firms promise to bring us one step closer to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions and also closer to a circular economy, in which almost nothing is thrown away. "We have to remove that myth that batteries go to landfill," says Marston. As EVs have become more popular, more and more of them are now reaching the end of their useful lives. That means more exhausted batteries from those aging vehicles have become available. Recycling batteries prevents expensive – and toxic – materials getting into the environment. Some of the other companies working on battery recycling technology are located in the US. The Inflation Reduction Act passed by President Biden's administration in 2022, which funded climate actions, has helped to motivate such efforts. Li-Cycle, a company established in 2016 which recovers critical materials from lithium-ion batteries, has plants in Canada, the US and Germany, for instance. Redwood Materials, a US company with campuses in Northern Nevada and South Carolina, was established in 2017 by one of the founders of electric car company Tesla, and has partnerships with carmakers Toyota, VW and BMW. Some older materials companies have also started experimenting, notably the Texas-based Ecobat Solutions. And many other firms are now also investing in battery recycling tech. Despite the interest, however, there's much progress to be made in the area. "The current lithium-ion battery recycling market is still in a very early industrial stage," says Xiaochu Wei, a battery recycling researcher at Imperial College London in the UK. Last year, German chemicals firm BASF "paused" work on a battery recycling plant in Spain, though the company says it still intends to build the facility. Part of the challenge in this field is how complex batteries are to begin with, which makes recycling them tricky. Every battery has two main components: the cathode and the anode. When providing power to, say, a motor, the anode releases negatively-charged electrons, which flow around a circuit until they return to the battery and are absorbed by the cathode. Electrons flow in the opposite direction when the battery is charging. In an electric vehicle battery, the cathode and anode are both thin sheets of material. The two are wrapped around each other in a spiral, like a Swiss roll with incredibly thin layers. In many battery designs, the anode is made of graphite, the same kind of carbon used in the cores of pencils. The cathode, meanwhile, often contains a variety of metals, including nickel, lithium and cobalt. Although recycling such structures is difficult, opportunity lies in the large number of valuable materials available, all of which can be sold lucratively if extracted and purified. Somewhat frustratingly, those materials are rather closely intermingled, and many of them are dangerous: several of the metals are toxic to people and wildlife, and they also pose fire and explosion hazards. Altilium's battery shredding process recovers graphite, originally from the anode, alongside other minerals. Getting graphite back out of a battery used to require a high-temperature process called pyrometallurgy, but this produces significant emissions, which is partly why Altilium has adopted a water-based system called hydrometallurgy. Staff soak the black mass in sulphuric acid, which allows them to filter out the graphite. This can be sold back to battery manufacturers, after some additional processing. What's left is an acidic liquid with a variety of metals dissolved in it. Some of them – aluminium, copper and iron – are not very valuable. By tweaking the acidity, the team can force them to precipitate out as grey powder. This, Wickham says, could be sold as filler for building materials. Now the team is in a position to extract the valuable nickel, cobalt and manganese. It recovers these one by one, mixing the liquid with kerosene and special chemicals that pull the metals out of solution. This is the step I saw with the glass tubes full of coloured liquids. Wickham explains that Altilium takes this approach because manufacturers are constantly changing the chemical makeup of batteries. "Battery chemistry is moving fast," he says. Wickham argues that battery companies will increasingly rely on nickel, compared to other metals, because it stores more energy for a given volume. (Some emerging battery designs, however, are moving away from nickel because of its high price tag.) By separating out individual metals, Altilium aims to supply battery manufacturers with the exact mixes they want for their new cathodes. The goal is to create a "closed-loop EV battery supply chain" in the UK, says Marston. Methods that reduce old batteries to their component raw materials will be essential for sustainable economies, says Anna Hankin, a senior lecturer in chemical engineering at Imperial College London in the UK, who is working on a project funded by Altilium alongside Wei. While it's possible to regenerate used batteries by replacing chemicals lost from individual components, "at some point that process will stop working", she says. "There will come a point for every battery when its components need to be shredded." Besides easing the transition to net zero, Marston argues that recycling EV batteries will take us a step closer to a circular economy, where, as much as possible, raw materials would be reused and recycled endlessly. This would reduce the need for extractive industries such as mining, which often damage ecosystems and pose risks to human health. In the case of EV batteries, instead of mining more lithium, nickel and other metals from the ground, we can keep reusing the supplies we already have. Researchers have estimated that, by 2040, over half the demand for lithium and nickel for these batteries could be supplied by recycling. In the next five to 10 years, Wei says, recycling could provide "a decent share" of the raw materials needed to make EV batteries – somewhere between 10% and 40%, she estimates. It would help if battery manufacturers redesigned their batteries to make it easier for recycling facilities to separate out the key components, she adds. If recycling takes off, the benefits could be significant. According to a 2024 IEA report, greater recycling of critical minerals could reduce the need for new mining by as much as 40% by mid-century. The IEA notes that many governments are creating policies to encourage recycling. For instance, in 2023 the European Union introduced a new Battery Regulation, which will introduce increasingly stringent requirements for "recycling efficiency, material recovery and recycled content", beginning in 2025. This isn't just about being environmentally friendly: there are also geopolitical motivations. In the last 20 years, the international order of things has significantly destabilised, with shocks such as Brexit and the policies of US President Donald Trump impacting global trade and international cooperation. Countries that are overly dependent on imports of critical supplies face significant risks in this new world, says Marston. The minerals used in EV batteries will be increasingly important for countries to continue functioning. "The future economies will be the ones which control the critical minerals," says Marston. That means countries like the UK have a problem. "The UK doesn't have these minerals at scale." In Marston's view, recycling electric vehicle batteries ensures energy security. "We see batteries which are in this country as a strategic asset in the UK," he says. Instead of sending them abroad to be recycled – possibly in a country with poor environmental and labour laws – he wants them to be recycled domestically. "If you do the processing in the UK, you add the value in the UK," he says. The challenge for all these companies is to scale up. Altilium is currently commissioning its new larger plant which should be able to operate continuously. If that proves successful, the company has plans for two progressively larger facilities. "If we do battery recycling at scale, we have confidence that we can produce a material which is around 20% lower cost than commercial material," says Marston. "That would look like 150,000 EV batteries per year." -- For essential climate news and hopeful developments to your inbox, sign up to the Future Earth newsletter, while The Essential List delivers a handpicked selection of features and insights twice a week. For more science, technology, environment and health stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
Reuters
13-02-2025
- Automotive
- Reuters
European EV battery material startups make recycling breakthroughs
LONDON, Feb 13 (Reuters) - Two European startups said on Thursday they had hit milestones in recycling electric vehicle battery materials that will be needed to meet European regulations, reduce China's dominance of the entire battery supply chain and lower CO2 emissions. Starting in August 2030, European automakers' EV batteries must include a minimum of 6% each of recycled lithium and nickel, and 16% of cobalt, rising five years later. This has spurred a race to challenge China's lead in battery recycling. British battery recycling startup Altilium said research from London's Imperial College showed small batteries made with its recycled cathode active materials perform as well as or better than those made with virgin materials from Chinese suppliers. Cathode materials typically include lithium, cobalt, nickel or manganese. Chief Operating Officer Christian Marston told Reuters the company's recycled materials reduce by 70% CO2 emissions versus new materials and cut costs by 20%. "This is a real technical breakthrough that really helps de-risk the use of recycled materials for automakers," Marston said. Altilium's investors include the corporate venture arm of Sociedad Quimica y Minera de Chile's ( opens new tab lithium business and Japanese trading house Marubeni (8002.T), opens new tab. The company is currently working with Tata Motors ( opens new tab unit JLR on EV battery cells made with recycled materials from old Jaguar i-Pace EVs. Separately, Germany's tozero, which has raised 17 million euros ($17.56 million) from investors including Honda (7276.T), opens new tab, is working on a pilot plant for recycling graphite and is talking to global automakers about supplying them as it scales up. The startup's hydrometallurgy process for recycling graphite is "net zero" for emissions if renewable energy is used, which will help automakers because graphite accounts for 40% of the carbon footprint of any lithium ion battery, tozero CEO Sarah Fleischer told Reuters. She said that tozero is talking to a number of global automakers about supplying them with recycled graphite. The company will build a pilot plant within the next two years and by 2027 aims to produce around 2,000 tonnes of recycled graphite annually, enough for around 50,000 EVs. ($1 = 0.9681 euros)
