French battery recycling startup Mecaware secures €40M

The French battery recycling startup Mecaware has secured €40M in funding a group of investors including Crédit Mutuel Innovtion, the French state through the fund SPI2, EIT InnoEnergy, UI Investissement, Kreazi, BNP Paribas Développment and Crédit Agricole Création. The funding will be used to industrialise the company's process in pilot scale with a 50 tonnes per year capacity in the company's facilities in Lyon.

Mecaware has developed a method which used CO2 to process black mass into new battery materials as lithium carbonate and nickel and cobalt hydroxide. The company has participated in French development project Scrap CO2MET with French battery maker Verkor and equipment manufacturer MTB which was awarded €22M to build a pilot for processing of battery production scrap. There are alos plans to install a 6,000-8,000 tonnes per annum plant adjacent to Verkor's battery plant in Dunkirk, given that the process proves successful.

What is notable is the amount which is comparably high for a development project which is not tied to a larger plant construction, not least that the company already received significant funding through the joint research project.

The use of supercritical CO2 as a solvent in battery recycling is fairly well researched and has advantages as high efficiency and the avoidance of sulphuric acid which usually is used in the leaching step. However we have yet not verified that the method is used on industrial scale today which could make Mecaware the first company to actually achieve this.