Recycling company Altilium said it completed the first phase of work on its new mini-commercial CAM plant and innovation centre. The 18,000 square-foot facility will, it said, be home to the UK’s first end-to-end facility for recycling EV batteries and production of low carbon cathode active materials (CAM).
It will also be an R&D centre, which it calls ACT 2. It will focus on reducing the capex and opex of future plants and on improving metal recovery rates, particularly for lithium.
This will be implemented at Altilium’s planned Teesside recycling hub (ACT 4), which it said will have the capacity to process battery waste from 150,000 EVs to CAM, making it one of the largest projects in Europe.
It said the expansion of Altilium’s facilities follows 18 months’ successful operation of its EV battery recycling pilot line (ACT 1) and the scale up of its Ecocathode process, which it claimed can recover over 95% of the critical metals from EV batteries.
In March Altilium said it entered a partnership with battery materials and technology company Talga Group. They will work together to recover graphite from old EV batteries for reuse in producing new battery anodes.
The company points to forecasts from the UK’s Advanced Propulsion Centre that UK anode demand for graphite will reach 46,000 tonnes by 2027 and 95,000 tonnes by 2030.
Altilium’s planned Teesside recycling plant is expected to have capacity to recover 20,000 tonnes of graphite a year. That will be enough to meet over 20% of UK demand by 2030, it said.
