Germany’s Accurec Recycling GmbH has taken its expansion plans one step further with the ceremonial commissioning of a new facility to recover lithium from scrap batteries. At its site in Krefeld, the company aims to recycle lithium carbonate and nickel-cobalt products on an industrial scale. It plans to increase the annual processing capacity from around 4,000 tonnes per year (tpa) at present to 20,000 tpa of input material in future.
In early December, the official inauguration ceremony with a symbolic startup of the hydrometallurgic line was attended by EU Environment Commissioner Jessica Roswall. Speaking at the event, Ms Roswall described the plant as an example of a "strategic project" for the EU’s critical raw materials supply, saying: "Supporting strategic projects and plants like this one is crucial to the European Commission and to me personally".
Last year, global demand for lithium rose by 30 per cent, the Commissioner said. Plants such as Accurec’s "will help the EU to meet the growing demand for lithium while helping to build a competitive and resilient economy". The Commissioner said she was especially pleased that a European medium-sized enterprise had taken this "huge step" and was "at the very forefront" of recycling efforts.
At the event, Accurec’s managing director Reiner Sojka presented his company’s technology in the context of conventional process chains. Until now, he noted, battery recycling in Europe has typically ended with the production of black mass, a powdery mixture containing metals, oxides and impurities.
Due to a lack of local facilities for further processing, this intermediate fraction is largely exported to Asia, where the challenging process of metallurgical extraction of critical raw materials, such as lithium, then takes place. Accurec’s technology addresses this bottleneck in the system: According to Mr Sojka, the principle behind the company’s process was asking: "What would happen if we reclaimed lithium at the beginning of the process rather than the end?"
Subscribers can access the full article here: ...
