“Battery Valley” in the region Hauts-de-France, near the English Channel, will host a 15,000 square metre plant for recycling battery materials. The French company Battri, founded two and a half years ago by CEO Maxime Trèves and partners, has announced a €10 million ($11million) funding win to improve capacity for recycling material from used lithium-ion batteries.
Battri intends to open a new plant in late 2025, employing 70 people handling a capacity of 30,000 tons of lithium-ion batteries annually. The lithium-ion battery market is expected to grow 700% between 2022 and 2030 according to Germany’s Statista Research Department. McKinsey and the Global Battery Alliance (GBA) predict a market size of 4.7TWh in 2030. EV batteries correspond to 4.3TWh.
According to a McKinsey report, recycling and reuse of lithium-ion batteries will correspond to around 13% of the market value of $400 billion by 2030. This opens new business opportunities, as well as greenwashing and illegal actions, said GBA.
Battri said that more than 1.5 million tons of battery materials will need to be recycled in 2030. The company has focused on the critical first stages of the recycling process, which enables it to recover around 95% of the material. The French plant can provide door-to-door logistics service for used batteries from more than 15 European countries.
The company will offer dismantling, crushing, sorting and handling of the black mass containing nickel, cobalt, lithium and graphite. Hydro recycling is used to separate the materials. One major service is tracking of battery recycling using software.
The production line can handle all types of common batteries: nickel manganese cobalt oxide (NMC), lithium iron phosphate (LFP), lithium nickel cobalt aluminum oxide (NCA), lithium titanate oxide (LTO), lithium cobalt oxide (LCO) and lithium manganese oxide (LMO).
