What Mercedes production director Jörg Burzer calls “mine for the batteries of tomorrow” has nothing to do with a mine. A green conveyor belt is at the beginning and sends the modules on their journey, at the end of which there will be bags with cobalt and nickel as well as barrels with lithium, manganese and copper solutions. The mine is the new battery recycling factory in which the car manufacturer will in future recycle the modules from old batteries in order to obtain valuable materials for new batteries in electric vehicles. “With the recycling factory we come very close to a real circular economy and increase independence from raw materials,” said Mercedes boss Ola Källenius at the opening on Monday in Kuppenheim near Karlsruhe, Baden. The car manufacturer has invested a mid-double-digit million amount into the factory, and the federal government is contributing between 15 and 17 million euros. According to the Baden-Württemberg company, it is the first recycling factory to combine mechanical and so-called metallurgical processing. “We don’t extract the elements in a blast furnace, but in a chemical process – and do so in a pure manner,” said Källenius.Valuable metals in black massUsually a car battery consists of eight to ten cell modules, which are shredded at the beginning of the processing process. After the system has washed out part of the black mass, which contains a large part of the important raw materials, sieves, air nozzles and magnets filter out plastics, aluminum, iron and copper and fill the raw materials into bags as granules. What remains is black mass, which is then put into chemical processing together with the washed out black mass. There, aluminum and iron and then copper, manganese, cobalt, nickel and lithium are precipitated with the addition of sulfuric acid, ammonia and hydrogen peroxide. According to Mercedes, the recovery rate is more than 96 percent. The factory is designed to process around 50,000 modules per year – that would be batteries for 5,000 to 6,250 electric cars. According to production director Burzer, Mercedes can “increase capacity a little more in the next few years, not by a factor of 100, but the end of the line has not yet been reached with 50,000 modules.” In the future, around 100 employees will work in the factory, all of whom come from the development of combustion engines and transmissions. With the factory, Mercedes wants to take a further step towards an effective circular economy in order to decouple growth and resource consumption. But it is also clear that there are solid economic and strategic motives behind the project. “We assume that obtaining raw materials through recycling is more economical in the long term than purchasing these raw materials on the market,” explains Burzer. “In addition, this makes us strategically independent in a certain way.” The production director, however, believes that it is unrealistic that Mercedes will eventually obtain the raw materials it needs through reprocessing alone – two-thirds independence, on the other hand, is “an interesting value.”More on the topicThe car manufacturer, which does not have its own cell production, chose the Kuppenheim location also because of its geographical proximity to Kaiserslautern: the battery manufacturer ACC, which is backed by Mercedes, the car manufacturer Stellantis and the oil company Totalenergies, is planning a battery cell factory there. However, due to a lack of demand, the ACC temporarily stopped construction a few months ago and will not announce what will happen next until the beginning of 2025. “We are also thinking of ACC as a customer for the raw materials obtained in Kuppenheim,” says Burzer. “And then we’ll see who else needs something.”
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