Recyclus to create a mobile lithium-ion battery recycling system

The company, 49 per cent owned by Technology Minerals, will lead the project, which has received £1.96m in funding from Innovate UK. The Advanced Materials & Processing Laboratory (AMPLab) at Birmingham University will support the project.

Recyclus' first lithium-ion recycling plant in Wolverhampton is capable of recycling 8,300 tonnes of lithium-ion per year.

They will now design and build a compact prototype Universal Battery Recycling System (UBRS), a mobile recycling truck capable of handling a complete range of Li-ion battery modules on an individual or batch-load basis.

The recycling trucks will be based on Recyclus’ existing technology for industrial-scale Li-ion battery recycling, which is capable of handling the five key lithium-ion chemistries in any combination. Recyclus plans to operate the recycling trucks with sizes ranging from 7.5 to 16 tonnes, which will be capable of processing between 500 and 2,000kh of Li-ion batteries per hour.

The company said the system will be completely sealed, emission free, with a gated infeed chamber and a series of sealed outfeed chutes which feeds separated materials - black mass (containing lithium, manganese, cobalt and nickel), electrolyte, ferrous and non-ferrous metals, and light mixed fraction (plastic, rubber and paper) - into collection containers.