Johnson Matthey partners with European Metal Recycling (EMR) on a sustainable, circular solution for lithium-ion battery recycling in the UK

Decarbonising transportation is a critical step in helping societies and industries meet their ambitious net zero emission targets to tackle the climate crisis. Here, battery electric vehicles for light-duty transport are a key solution. The challenge is recovering the critical materials from the batteries at end-of-life without harming the environment.

To tackle this, Johnson Matthey, a global leader in sustainable technologies, has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with European Metal Recycling (EMR), one of the world’s largest material recyclers and a leading recycler of end-of-life vehicles, to develop an efficient value chain in the UK for recycling lithium-ion batteries and cell manufacturing materials.

Recycling the batteries from end-of-life electric vehicles will produce significant quantities of strategic materials such as lithium, nickel and cobalt with a fraction of the carbon footprint of the same materials from mined sources.

EMR operates the UK’s largest network of Authorized Treatment Facilities where vehicles are collected in 50 sites and recycled in compliance with strict environmental legislation. EMR is developing new, collection and recycling processes for electric vehicles and their batteries, to recover intermediate materials containing the strategic battery metals for further processing and where possible, closed loop return of materials.

Johnson Matthey is developing additional processes to produce fully refined materials suitable for direct use in lithium-ion battery manufacturing, increasing the recycled content of new batteries. The full closed loop recycling service that Johnson Matthey and EMR will develop together will help to deliver the future resource security and carbon-reduction aspirations of battery producers and vehicle manufacturers.

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