HOW THE UK IS GEARING UP TO BE AN EV BATTERY CENTRE

Recycling and refining advances will give UK plants vital raw materials

- JOHN EVANS

The UK's ambition to become a major centre of EV battery manufacture is one step closer as work begins on its first integrated lithium ion battery recycling and refining facility capable of producing the key ingredients of battery cells on an industrial scale.

The new plant in Plymouth is the penultimate stage in British company Altilium’s four-part plan, which will culminate in the creation of a refinery on Teesside. When it goes live at the end of 2027, this is slated to produce high-quality, recycled cathode active material (CAM) for UK gigafactories.

Until then, the Plymouth plant will produce recycled nickel mixed hydroxide precipitate (MHP) and lithium sulphate – critical intermediate materials for domestic production of battery cathodes used by a range of industries.

Creating the CAM used in EV batteries requires expensive refining. Efforts in this direction have been boosted by rules governing new EV batteries sold in the EU that state they will need to have minimum levels of recycled lithium, nickel and cobalt from 2031, with further increases in 2036.

Altilium has developed a process for extracting and processing these metals to the required quality and earlier this year announced it had produced, at the UK Battery Industrialisation Centre, the UK's first EV battery cells using recycled CAM and complying with those regulations.

DOMESTIC BATTERY RECYCLING 'VITAL'