Below are a few battery recycling projects funded by the EU:
🔋 BATRAW Project
The BATRAW project aims to stabilize battery supply chains to cater for the anticipated growth in electric mobility markets in the EU. As a part of the 4-year project, two pilot tests with electric vehicle batteries will be carried out. The aim is to optimize the recovery of the aluminum, cobalt, copper, graphite, lithium, manganese, and nickel found in electric vehicle batteries. Using the recovered raw materials, the ambition is to make a prototype battery. As a part of the project, “eco-design guidelines that favour the repair and dismantling of batteries, as well as best practices for the safe handling and transport of these wastes” will be developed.
🔋 Battery2030+ Project
The Battery 2030+ project is a long-term and large-scale European research initiative, which is aimed at accelerating and enhancing the research and production of batteries in the EU. The initiative is focused on finding “concrete actions that support the implementation of the European Green Deal, the UN Sustainable Development Goals, as well as the European Action plan on Batteries and the European SET-plan.” The project hopes to facilitate the invention of “the sustainable batteries of the future” and it aims to facilitate Europe in reaching its goals of becoming a climate-neutral society.
🔋 CROCODILE Project
The CROCODILE project aims to improve the recovery processes for cobalt, sourced from primary and secondary sources across Europe. The project seeks to improve the efficiency, as well as the economic and environmental performance, of the recovery processes. The end goal is to create zero-waste strategies for different waste streams that are rich in cobalt, such as spent batteries and catalysts. To reach this end, the project will create an “economically and environmentally viable mobile commercial metallurgical system […] to produce cobalt metal […] from different sources of waste”. Notably, this mobile system is envisioned to have a daily production capacity of up to 200kg of cobalt.
🔋 ECO²LIB Project
The ECO²LIB project aims to explore the use of lithium-ion batteries that are made using silicon-based materials. The project’s ambition is to optimize the usability and to create a more eco-friendly, cost-effective, and efficient approach to the recycling of these batteries. The project will look at the “full life cycle of the battery: from the material selection and optimisation, over the cell and battery production, to the use phase, and finalised with the recycling of the battery”.
🔋 GRINNER Project
The GRINNER project aims to improve waste management and to reduce the risk of battery fires and explosions by creating new technologies for the detection of batteries in e-waste. The envisioned product is a machine that can use artificial intelligence to identify and remove e-waste that contains batteries before this waste enters shredders. The envisioned AI battery detection system will use data from X-Ray detectors, in combination with pick-and-place robots, to achieve this.
🔋 HARARE Project
The HARARE project’s aim is to recover rare minerals and metals from aluminum and copper waste streams using hydrogen. More specifically, the project’s goal is to reclaim aluminum and copper from bauxite residues and copper slag. (Bauxite residues and copper slag are commonly dumped in large reservoirs, although they contain mineral and metal residues, which could be used as a resource.) Ultimately, the project aims to find ways for the European metallurgical industry to minimize their emissions and increase their efficiency in raw material use.
🔋 LiBinfinity Project
The LiBinfinity project aims to improve battery recycling and find a fully circular approach to the creation of lithium-ion batteries. In other words, the idea is to create new lithium-ion batteries from old ones. In line with this, the project “will develop a mechanico-hydrometallurgical process without any energy-intensive process steps to reach even higher recycling rates. Materials that cannot be separated mechanically will be split at comparably low temperatures with the help of water and chemicals.”
🔋 RESPECT Project
The RESPECT project hopes to revolutionize the recycling of lithium-ion and other batteries and to create new circular and sustainable battery markets in Europe. The project aims to close the loop for batteries, by maximizing the recycling of critical raw materials, active materials, and other resources in batteries and then reusing these recycled resources in the cathode and anode materials of new batteries. The project aims to achieve this by improving the processes used in the global supply chains of different batteries.
Read more about the EU-funded battery projects here:
- https://accurec.de/eu-funded-project-eco2lib?lang=en
- https://www.linkedin.com/company/grinner-project/
- https://www.greencarcongress.com/2022/11/20221128-harare.html
- https://clepa.eu/mediaroom/battery-recycling-will-be-the-focus-of-new-eu-project-respect/