German car giant Mercedes-Benz has opened the first battery recycling plant in Europe which will utilise technology developed by Australian company Neometals (ASX:NMT).
The new plant – which is located in Kuppenheim in Germany – will recover key materials such as lithium, nickel, and cobalt and has an annual capacity of 2,500 tonnes.
The recovered materials will be used to produce more than 50,000 battery modules for new all-electric Mercedes-Benz models.
Primobius, a joint venture between Neometals and Germany’s SMS Group, was selected as a technology partner in March 2022 and was responsible for the engineering, equipment supply, and installation of the two-stage recycling plant.
The integrated solution was built specifically for Mercedes-Benz, which says that with the Promobius technology, it is the first automotive manufacturer worldwide to “close the battery material loop” with its own recycling plant.
Primobius CEO Dr Michel Siemon says electric vehicles have a very large legacy CO2 footprint from the production phase owing to the whole life carbon emissions associated with the battery raw materials involved.
“The concept of electromobility can only be sustainable once we succeed in recovering valuable battery materials in an energy-efficient way,” he says.
“That is exactly what we do with our solutions. We are proud to be amongst the first to realise a resource-efficient recycling technology in the heart of Europe.”
Using a two-step process, systems shred end-of-life and scrap batteries from electric vehicles, appliances, or stationary energy storage applications and salvage the materials they contain.
While the mechanical process sorts the plastics, copper, aluminium, and iron by type in a complex, multi-stage process, the downstream hydrometallurgical process focuses on the so-called ‘black mass’, which is the main product from the mechanical process.
Black mass contains the valuable materials that make up the electrodes in battery cells. The valuable metals comprising lithium, nickel, cobalt and manganese are extracted individually in a multistage chemical process.
The shredder in Kuppenheim has been in operation since spring 2024, with final commissioning in progress.
Final assembly and commissioning of the hydrometallurgical processes will continue gradually following the opening.
Primobius has also entered into a five-year research collaboration aimed at jointly developing a tailored, industrial-scale lithium ion battery recycling solution for Mercedes-Benz.
Write to Angela East at Mining.com.au
Images: Mercedes-Benz
