BASF starts its prototype material recovery plant in Germany

The German chemical and cathode producer BASF has successfully started operating its prototype battery material recovery plant in Schwarzheide, Germany. The plant will be used to optimise the technology which later will be used in the company's commercial plant which will be built in Tarragona in Spain.

In our recycling data base we have estimated the capacity of this plant to 20,000 tonnes of infeed capacity on cell level (around 10,000 tonnes of black mass) with a staged scaling of production. That means the plant already will be an important addition to the European recycling market which so far has had limited recovery capacity.

BASF is yet to open its own black mass plant in Schwarzheide but has signed an agreement with Stena Recycling for sourcing of black mass from Stena's pre-processing facility in Halmstad that was inaugurated a year ago in April 2023.

The recycling plant will be an important component in BASF's battery material strategy which also include precursor and cathode production. The company has however faced big problems to get their new precursor plant in Harjavalta, Finland, permitted and announced the 11th April that it has started change negotitions to make signficant redundancies leading to a scenario that a completely new facility might not be put into production. What this mean for the recycling product, which naturally would go into precursor production as a next step, has not been detailed from BASF.