Acid-free recycling plant recovers lithium from dead batteries in Germany

As the world electrifies cars and stores more renewable energy, mountains of lithium-ion batteries will eventually wear out. Recovering their valuable metals instead of mining new ones is essential for a truly clean energy system, yet lithium in particular has been hard to reclaim cheaply and cleanly. On April 10, 2026, Resource Recycling reported that Bavaria-based startup Tozero had opened an industrial demonstration plant aimed squarely at that challenge.

Located at Chemical Park Gendorf in Germany, the facility can process about 1,500 metric tons of battery scrap per year and recover lithium, graphite and a nickel-cobalt mix. What sets it apart is the method: a hydrometallurgical process that works in a single cycle without using acids, avoiding much of the hazardous chemistry that conventional recycling relies on. The plant reported lithium recovery rates above 80%, a level aligned with European Union targets set for 2031. Co-founder and CEO Sarah Fleischer said the technology had now been scaled 10,000 times, enabling recovery of these materials at industrial scale, with co-founder and CTO Dr. Ksenija Milicevic Neumann leading the technical work.

“Recovering their valuable metals instead of mining new ones is essential for a truly clean energy system, yet lithium in particular has been hard to reclaim cheaply and cleanly.”

The timing matters. The EU's Critical Raw Materials Act calls for a quarter of the bloc's supply to come from recycling, reducing dependence on imported and newly mined materials. A cleaner, acid-free way to recover battery metals close to where they are used could shorten supply chains, cut mining pressure and keep critical resources circulating rather than buried as waste.

The honest caveats are clear. A demonstration plant is a stepping stone, not a finished industry; 1,500 tons a year is modest next to the coming wave of spent batteries, and recovery rates and economics must hold up as Tozero scales to full commercial volumes. Battery chemistries also keep changing, which recyclers must track. Even so, an acid-free process recovering most of the lithium from dead batteries, running at industrial scale in Europe, is exactly the kind of circular-economy progress the energy transition needs. If it scales, recycling could become a serious, cleaner source of the materials that power our future.