Mercedes-Benz opened Europe’s first battery recycling plant with an integrated mechanical-hydrometallurgical process making it the first car manufacturer worldwide to close the battery recycling loop with its own in-house facility.
The recycling plant in Kuppenheim, southern Germany, creates a genuine circular economy. The expected recovery rate of the mechanical-hydrometallurgical recycling plant is more than 96 percent.
Materials such as lithium, nickel and cobalt can be recovered in a way which is suitable for use in new batteries for future all-electric Mercedes-Benz vehicles.
“The future of the automobile is electric, and batteries are an essential component of this. To produce batteries in a resource-conserving and sustainable way, recycling is also key. The circular economy is a growth engine and, at the same time, an essential building block for achieving our climate targets! I congratulate Mercedes-Benz for its courage and foresight shown by this investment in Kuppenheim. Germany remains a cutting-edge market for new and innovative technologies,” said Olaf Scholz, Federal Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany.
For the first time in Europe, the Mercedes-Benz battery recycling plant covers all steps from shredding battery modules to drying and processing active battery materials.
The mechanical process sorts and separates plastics, copper, aluminium and iron in a complex, multi-stage process.
The downstream hydrometallurgical process is dedicated to the so-called black mass. These are the active materials that make up the electrodes of the battery cells. The valuable metals cobalt, nickel and lithium are extracted individually in a multi-stage chemical process.
These recyclates are of battery quality and therefore suitable for use in the production of new battery cells.
The Mercedes-Benz battery recycling plant in Kuppenheim has an annual capacity of 2,500 tonnes. The recovered materials feed into the production of more than 50,000 battery modules for new all-electric Mercedes-Benz models. The knowledge gained could help scale up production volumes in the medium to long term.
Also in the news:
Italvolt partners with StoreDot to produce extreme fast charging lithium-ion battery technology
Solid Power deepens relationship with BMW to build batteries at home
Octopus Energy partners with Stellantis to accelerate EV uptake
Tesla announces Powerwall customers can now sell their electricity back to the grid