Mercedes-Benz Opens Own State of the Art Battery Recycling Plant

On October 21, 2024, Mercedes-Benz opened Europe’s first battery recycling plant featuring a new, pioneering mechanical-hydrometallurgical process. This facility, located in Kuppenheim, southern Germany, makes Mercedes-Benz the world’s first automaker with its own dedicated battery recycling facility.

The plant represents a significant leap forward for the German auto industry, establishing a circular economy where the same company that manufactures EVs also recycles their battery packs. This closed-loop system enables the efficient recovery of valuable and scarce materials like lithium, nickel, and cobalt in a cost-effective way.

Mercedes-Benz has invested tens of millions of euros in this new venture, aiming to counter recent advancements by Chinese competitors in the European EV market and strengthen its position as a sustainability leader.

“The future of the automobile is electric, and batteries are an essential component of this. To produce batteries in a resource-conserving and sustainable way, recycling is also key. The circular economy is a growth engine and, at the same time, an essential building block for achieving our climate targets!”
Olaf Scholz, Federal Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany

The partner that assisted Mercedes-Benz in the creation of this project was Primobius, a joint venture between German plant and mechanical engineering company SMS group and Australian process technology developer Neometals. The plant is receiving government funding (much like many automotive projects in China) from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action as part of a scientific research project with three German universities.

Compared to the current recycling pyrometallurgy process in Europe today, this new process is less intensive on energy consumption and material waste. In addition, this plant operates in a net carbon-neutral manner (like all Mercedes-Benz production sites) and this plant in particular runs on 100% green energy.

Takeaways

• The German government is proud to support this project as other OEMs in the country such as Volkswagen are shutting down plants
• Mercedes-Benz being the first to market with their own in-house recycling operation should help cost recovery efforts
• This plant may prove beneficial for determining which battery pack engineering processes work and which don't when they are examined before recycling.
• The Kuppenheim plant has an annual capacity of 2,500 tonnes. The recovered materials feed into the production of more than 50,000 battery modules for new all-electric Mercedes-Benz models.

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