“For car and battery makers keen to reduce their carbon footprint as well as meet the new EU battery regulations, it won’t make sense to ship in material from elsewhere,” said Schreiber. “The battery is an EV’s biggest single source of embedded carbon. One with CAM made from recycled metals has up to 74% fewer embedded emissions.”
Altilium uses a third-party supplier to handle the first stage of its recycling process. This involves shredding used batteries and extracting their crucial metals in the form of a powder called black mass, which Altilium then refines.
Most of the feedstock comprises failed and damaged batteries, rather than those at the end of their useful life. There are no accurate figures on how many end-of-life batteries exist but the industry expects to see appreciable numbers of them coming to the market after 2030.
Refining black mass is the goal
Meanwhile, the UK’s first at-scale lithium ion battery recycling plant owned by Recyclus Group has just dispatched 111 tonnes of black mass to Glencore, a global mining and recycling company, which, like Altilium, will separate out the metals and refine them but using its own process.
“Since we started recycling at scale in 2023, our output of black mass has increased year on year,” said Robin Brundle, Recyclus Group co-founder and director. “This year, we plan to process 5000 tonnes of batteries but we have the capacity to process 22,000.”