How much charge does your laptop have right now? If you’ve done a few hours work and your battery has power to spare, there’s a good chance you have lithium to thank. That’s because any technology that needs recharging often uses lithium, a key ingredient in cathode active materials to store energy. Experts from across Umicore – Wim Geens, Business Head Lithium & Manganese and Pieter Verhees, Techno-Commercial Manager Battery Recycling Solutions – explain lithium’s starring role in the energy transition and why Europe needs to scale its lithium recycling capacity.
Lithium’s mobility and agility
Lithium has grown in importance to society over the last couple of decades, having been awarded its status as a critical raw material as recently as 2020. For a long time, it was used primarily for making lubricants, ceramics, paint driers and mental health medication. According to popular belief, it was even an ingredient in the original 7Up recipe.
Today, lithium is a crucial metal for the energy transition and modern electrification. As the lightest metal, with highly mobile ions, lithium can pack a lot of energy into a very small space. This high energy density and efficient energy movement makes it ideal for powering batteries. Demand for lithium has therefore never been greater as more rechargeable portable electronics and electric vehicles (EVs) come onto the market.
“EVs are definitely the largest market for lithium today,” says Wim Geens. “The picture looked very different 10, 20 years ago, when battery technology was in its early stages and mainly used in consumer electronics. Since then, the tides have changed, and batteries have moved from being a fringe application of lithium to its most significant one by far.”
The demand of batteries is getting bigger and more powerful, as evidenced by the steep rise of battery energy storage systems (BESS), which are strong enough to help balance the electricity grid. In the future, we’ll likely see next-generation ‘solid state’ batteries for EVs which will require more advanced lithium components, keeping demand for the metal high.
Clearly Umicore’s work with lithium has evolved to meet demand in these new applications as we produce the cathode active materials – that is, the parts of a battery that help it to store energy and optimise its performance – for all sizes of batteries and all kinds of uses, from smartphones to EVs.
Lithium recycling: How to capture a very light and highly mobile element
More than 15 years ago, Umicore pioneered with the recycling of lithium-ion batteries at our pilot battery recycling plant in Hoboken, Belgium. While the early days primarily focused on mobile phone batteries, today it’s about EV batteries and production scrap from which we recover cobalt, nickel, copper and lithium, all of which are valuable and/or critical metals. We can expect waste streams to increase significantly in the coming decade as sales of EVs rise.
We achieve industry leading recovery rates for these four metals and the recovery rate of more than 90 percent for lithium really stands out.
Capturing and recycling lithium is no small feat. As the lightest metal on Mendeleev’s periodic table, lithium forms very small, highly reactive ions that dissolve easily and spread quickly in solution. This makes it hard to isolate and recover.
"Lithium is like the salt in your kitchen: it dissolves easily in water,” says Pieter Verhees. “In a typical battery recycling process, lithium dissolves in an acidic solution together with other metals such as nickel and cobalt. Recovering lithium selectively from this mixed solution is highly process-intensive. At our pilot battery recycling plant in Hoboken, we’ve developed an efficient process that converts lithium into a vapour, allowing us to capture it from the flue gases. The lithium is then converted into a salt, ready to be reused as battery‑grade material.”
Battery grade materials have been refined to the ultra-high purity required for battery applications. Here Umicore again closes the loop: we reintroduce these metals as key ingredients for the manufacturing of cathode active materials which determine energy density and performance of new batteries.
One of our distinctive and strongest advantages is that we both recycle and manufacture cathode active materials and share expertise and experience across the board. For example, teams at our Battery Materials Business Unit provide our Battery Recycling Solutions colleagues with their expertise on battery-grade lithium and other metals, including the qualification procedures and specifications. We work closely with our partners and customers both in the production of cathode materials as well as in the battery recycling ecosystem.
Recycling lithium for a European supply chain
Access to lithium through recycling is clearly critical. While demand for lithium is global and growing, its sourcing and refining are largely concentrated in a few regions. Lithium is mostly mined from hard rock spodumene in Australia and from the brines in the ‘lithium triangle’ of Argentina, Chile and Bolivia. Refining is even more concentrated with China accounting for more than 70% of capacity worldwide.
Against this backdrop, Europe is looking to build out its own lithium supply chain and become less dependent on any single country or region. For example, the European Battery Regulation enhances the recycling of battery materials including lithium.
Umicore is well positioned within this context because as the main buyer of battery grade lithium in Europe it is teaming up and evaluating the quality of products supplied by emerging lithium suppliers and their new projects across Europe.
Additionally, recycling will be a crucial part of the European supply chain strategy.
Lithium recycling is going to play a much more significant role in Europe, because there are currently so few primary sources of lithium here. With more and more EVs on European roads, there is a growing pipeline of lithium that will be available for recycling when vehicles reach end of life, ready to go back into new units and closing the loop.
With decades of experience across both battery materials and recycling, Umicore is uniquely positioned at the heart of Europe’s lithium value chain. By combining industry leading lithium recovery with deep expertise in battery‑grade materials, the company not only helps secure critical metals for an electrifying economy, but also supports Europe’s ambition to build a more resilient, sustainable and circular supply chain.
