POSCO opens 7,000 tpa battery recycling plant in Poland – will be operated by Sungeel Hitech

The South Korean cathode manufacturer POSCO has opened a pre-processing plant in Brzeg Dolny, Poland. The plant which will mainly process production scrap from LG Energy Solutions' plant in Wroclaw has a capacity of 7,000 tonnes. The black mass produced will be shipped to POSCO's soon-to-be opened plant in South Korea operated by it's joint venture with Huayou Cobalt, POSCO Hy Clean.

POSCO and Sungeel has been planning for the Polish plant for some time and originally were targeting a site in . Due to protests from the local inhabitants the companies found a new location in the Bukowice Industrial Park, 5 km from Brzeg Dolny. The plant which is smaller than we anticipated earlier will not exclusively be used for LG Energy Solutions but will "collect and disassemble scrap and used batteries that come out while manufacturing batteries in Europe" according to POSCO.

For Sungeel this is the third plant in Europe and the first outside of Hungary. The company is currently planning a 20,000 tpa plant in Germany and anticipates that a hydrometallurgical plant potentially can built in Europe from 2026 and onwards. In this case Sungeel will not recovery the material but it will go to POSCO HY Clean Metal's plant which is under construction in Gwangyang in South Korea. This plant will have a capacity to process 12,000 tons of black mass annually, equal to 24,000 - 30,000 tonnes of waste battery cells.

More about the opening here.