tozero inaugurates the first industrial battery recycling facility in Europe.

      The Munich startup's demonstration facility at Chemical Park Gendorf in Bavaria processes 1,500 tonnes of battery waste each year, producing 100 tonnes of high-purity lithium carbonate, with costs reported to be twice as competitive as those of traditional miners. A full-scale plant designed to handle 45,000 tonnes annually is set to be developed by 2030.

      Europe is facing a battery challenge that is largely invisible. Across the continent, tens of thousands of end-of-life electric vehicles are parked in driveways, piled in garages, or decaying in junkyards, containing the very lithium, graphite, and nickel-cobalt that European manufacturers are currently trying to obtain from abroad.

      Until now, no company has possessed a method for recovering these materials on an industrial scale. Tozero, a Munich-based deep-tech startup established in 2022, claims to have developed such a method, and has now activated it.

      The company has launched its industrial demonstration facility at Chemical Park Gendorf in Bavaria, which provided the plug-and-play industrial infrastructure that enabled tozero to complete the setup within six months.

      The facility can process over 1,500 tonnes of battery waste annually and produce more than 100 tonnes of high-purity lithium carbonate each year. In contrast to conventional pyrometallurgical recycling methods that recover copper and aluminum while losing lithium and graphite, tozero’s proprietary acid-free hydrometallurgical process operates in a single cycle, yielding materials pure enough for direct use in battery cell production without additional refinement.

      The company has achieved significant and independently verified commercial milestones. In April 2024, just nine months after opening its Munich pilot plant, tozero became the first European company to supply recycled lithium to commercial clients. By February 2025, it qualified 100% recycled graphite for lithium-ion battery cell production at industrial scale, placing it as the first in Europe to do so.

      The demonstration facility now integrates both milestones at a larger scale and will serve as the foundation for a full-scale commercial operation aimed at processing 45,000 tonnes of battery waste annually, with a target production of around 8,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate and approximately 10,000 tonnes of graphite by 2030.

      Tozero was established in July 2022 by Sarah Fleischer, a serial entrepreneur and mechanical engineer with prior experience launching an early-stage VC and startup incubator at the Luxembourg Space Agency, alongside Dr. Ksenija Milicevic Neumann, a metallurgy specialist whose groundbreaking research at RWTH Aachen University, published in Nature, underpins the company's technology.

      The company has completed pilot projects with BMW, MAN, and other automotive OEMs, showcasing a stable lithium recovery rate exceeding 80%, already meeting the EU’s mandatory target for 2031 under the Battery Directive.

      Its investors include NordicNinja, Atlantic Labs, Honda, JGC Group via Mirai Corporate Venture Capital, Verve Ventures, Possible Ventures, and In-Q-Tel, the strategic investment branch of the US intelligence community, together with a €2.5 million EIC Accelerator grant. The total funding amounts to approximately €17 million.

      The geopolitical backdrop makes the timing crucial. China dominates the global supply of graphite and processes a significant portion of lithium worldwide, while Europe remains largely dependent on imports for both materials.

      The EU Critical Raw Materials Act requires that 25% of supply is derived from recycling, a target for which recyclers like tozero are being established. Global lithium demand is expected to quadruple by 2030, spurred by the growth of electric vehicles and grid-scale energy storage, while graphite demand in the EU alone could increase by as much as 25 times by 2040.

      The Gendorf plant represents a small but significant initial industrial response to a supply issue that Europe has yet to diligently tackle on a large scale.