By Nick Carey
LONDON (Reuters) – Japanese trading house Marubeni has invested $5 million in British electric vehicle battery recycler Altilium and will help it to scale up operations, the companies said on Tuesday.
The investment is part of Altilium’s Series B fundraising after the corporate venture arm of Sociedad Quimica y Minera de Chile’s (SQM) lithium business provided $9.4 million of Altilium’s $12 million Series A round last year.
The increase in sales of electric vehicles has brought with it a race to recycle the valuable minerals in their batteries – primarily lithium, cobalt and nickel – which can be worth thousands of euros per car, and counter China’s dominance of this field.
Altilium is one of a number of companies gearing up recycling operations in Europe, where today most EV batteries are shredded into ‘black mass’ that is shipped to China for processing.
The business currently has a small recycling plant and by 2026 expects to recycle around 24,000 EV battery packs annually.
Altilium aims to expand that to 150,000 battery packs by 2030, which chief operating officer Christian Marston told Reuters would require an investment of over $1 billion.
SQM has been “helping Altilium with the engineering scale up,” while Marubeni has already been providing EV batteries for recycling and helping with “the financial scale up,” Marston said.
“Marubeni’s strength lies in bringing partners that can support building high capex infrastructure in the UK and a domestic supply chain independent of China,” Marston said.
(Reporting by Nick Carey; Editing by Alexandra Hudson)
