The French mining company Eramet and waste management specialist Suez have decided on Dunkirk, near the Belgian border, for the location of their EV battery recycling plant. The first part of the plant is scheduled to be operational by 2025, with a capacity of up to 50 000 tons of battery packs per year.

Eramet and Suez chose to join forces in 2019 to tackle the issue of EV battery recycling, which is still lacking in infrastructure to fully utilize the resources of battery packs after the useful life span of the vehicle.

Both French companies have announced that their battery recycling plant will open in the Grand Port Maritime in Dunkirk by 2025.

Upstream and downstream

The plant, which is a part of the ‘ReLieVe’ joint project, will consist of two facilities: an upstream part, which dismantles EV battery packs into ‘black mass’, and a downstream facility, which extracts and refines the valuable metals from the black mass for reuse in the production of new batteries.

The upstream dismantling plant is expected to be operational by 2025, with a capacity of 50 000 tons of battery packs per year, equivalent to around 200 000 EV battery packs.

The downstream plant targets a 2027 start-up, with total investment figures announced by the end of 2023 and 2024, respectively. Eramet and Suez have received an €80 million subsidy from the EU for studies, plant construction, and operation costs.