REBLEND: Recovering battery-grade materials from upgraded black mass to enable remanufacturing of automotive battery products in the UK

Despite being a cornerstone of the UK's industrial and energy-transition strategy, the UK automotive **Lithium-Ion Battery** **(LIB)** production industry faces two existential threats:

* **LIBs require vast amounts of critical raw materials, especially the Cathode Active Materials (CAMs) cobalt, nickel and lithium** (175kt needed by 2035). CAMs are all sourced from overseas, creating critical security of supply issues.
* OEMs and LIB manufacturers who are responsible for end-of-life (EoL) batteries **lack LIB recycling infrastructure**. Consequently, there is a **growing mountain of automotive LIB waste** (~6.6Mt by 2030) that must be exported, resulting in loss of value to the UK (CAMs worth £1.2bn by 2030).

Automotive LIBs can be reused or recycled to deal responsibly with battery-waste and provide a source of battery-grade materials. However, commercial, SotA recycling processes are inefficient and costly, do not produce raw materials of sufficient quality for reuse in automotive batteries, and are only available overseas.

Currently, UK battery manufacturers and collectors are:

* Losing the value of the CAMs (~£1.2bn by 2030);
* Paying European/Asian companies to dispose of batteries;
* Increasing reliance on insecure primary material extraction and processing supply lines.

REBLEND aims to develop the core processes and capabilities for a UK-based automotive battery recycling industry that can recover CAMs from production scrap and EoL automotive and consumer batteries for reuse in automotive batteries.

REBLEND will demonstrate three processes for recovering the most expensive CAMs, cobalt, nickel and lithium through:

1. Combining novel delamination, magnetic, electrostatic and membrane separation techniques to produce separated and \>89% pure anodic and \>94% pure cathodic black mass from shredded EoL LIBs (compared to <89% pure mixed black mass from best-in-class competitor) enabling battery-grade CAM recovery for £6/kg.
2. Direct cathode reclamation from production scrap (containing nickel & cobalt) removing the need for hydro-metallurgy and enabling direct reuse in new cells.
3. Processing coarse shredded material (2-6mm) using electrostatic and magnetic separation, preventing carcinogenic dust formation, significantly reducing H&S risks for workers.

Key areas of innovation in the project are:

* Optimisation of LIB shredding parameters to reduce undesirable reactions that limit recovery of materials.
* Use of world-leading polymeric nanocomposite membrane technology to achieve zero process waste and extract lithium.
* Optimisation of innovative electrostatic and magnetic separation techniques and (for the first time) delamination of electrode and current-collector to enable cost-effective recovery of high-purity CAM recyclates at pilot-scale (10kg batches).
* Direct recycling techniques for cathode reclamation.