Imagine a giant puzzle where the pieces are glued together and dangerous to touch. This project builds a robotic system to take those puzzles apart safely and uses a chemical 'cleaning' process to pull out the valuable metals. Instead of burning the batteries and wasting energy, it harvests the materials to build brand new batteries.
Current battery recycling relies on energy-heavy smelting (pyro-metallurgy) or slow manual dismantling. This creates a bottleneck in the supply of secondary critical raw materials for the EU battery market.
A robotic dismantling prototype with vision-based recognition and four material recovery processes for metals and polymers. It also includes a Battery Passport digital traceability system.
If you are a cell producer dealing with high costs of raw cobalt and lithium — this project developed low cobalt content cells and recycled precursors that lower your dependence on imported minerals.
If you are a recycling plant dealing with slow, manual battery dismantling — this project developed a robotically-supported dismantling process with vision-based recognition that reduces cycle times and improves safety.
If you are an EV maker dealing with strict EU battery regulations — this project developed a Battery Passport methodology that ensures full traceability of materials from the old car back into a new battery.
The project has advanced the recycling processes toward TRL 5–6, moving beyond lab-scale to validated prototypes and scaling activities.
The project has defined 13 Key Exploitable Results and is preparing specific business and IPR strategies for market uptake.
Based on available project data, the project replaces energy-wasting pyro-metallurgy with hydrometallurgical processes that recover Li and Al with lower energy consumption.
It implements a Battery Passport methodology to improve process traceability, aligning with EU circular economy goals.
The project runs from 2022-09-01 to 2026-08-31, with current activities focused on scaling and validation.
The consortium is heavily weighted toward technical execution with 25 partners across 7 countries. It maintains a strong industrial base (28% industry ratio, including 6 SMEs), ensuring that the 9 research organizations and 3 universities are developing solutions with direct market application in the battery value chain.
Contact FUNDACION CARTIF in Spain for licensing details on the robotic dismantling prototype.
Contact SciTransfer to connect with the 13 Key Exploitable Results owners.
