Italian GME Recycling is eyeing the Gulf region for expansion of its lead battery recycling equipment market and is planning to open a regional office. This will build on the export of a lead battery recycling plant to Qatar’s Suhail Industrial Group, its biggest to date.
GME’s Matteo Fontana told BEST the partnership with Suhail is its first major core collaboration in the Gulf. It regularly dispatches technicians to Doha for maintenance, checks and updates. The Arabian area, including Qatar and Saudi Arabia, will be a primary market for GME for the future, he said, along with north Africa.
“We are talking about opening a new strategic office in the MENA cluster – the Middle East and North Africa. We are choosing if it should be in Tunisia or in Libya,” he said. An engineering team would create the office that would act as a bridge between GME Italy and these countries, he said.
Fontana said the work with Suhail has entailed high expectations, which GME has largely met and is now looking to use as a stepping stone in the region. The company is receiving new leads and prospects every day about recycling.
The plant, with capacity to recycle 50,000 tonnes per year of lead-acid batteries, comprises a battery breaker, water neutralisation unit, wet scrubber, automatic charging station, rotary furnaces, a 35-tonne set of kettles and ingot casting machine.
The facility will be the first smelting and refining plant to produce pure lead ingots in the state of Qatar, according to GME. The battery breaker has a capacity of 10 tonnes per hour in phase 1 with a complete smelting, refining and casting line to be added as the second and third phases.
Fontana said the plant is typical and GME has installed it before around the world, but this is a relatively large one and the first in the Gulf. The contract value was some €5 million ($5.3 million), rising to around €9 million next year when including maintenance. The claim is a 90% recovery rate.
He said central and South Africa are also emerging markets. In Nigeria, it is installing a recycling plant near Lagos. India is also a target market, but very low prices make it difficult to match production quality with cost expectations, he said.
Photo: Workers installing machinery. GME Recycling.
