Dunkirk, the recycling channel’s port of call

350 million electric vehicles are expected on the roads between now and 2030. This powerful acceleration, prompted by the European ban on the sale of fossil fuel vehicles in 2035, brings with it the difficulty of supplying raw materials to power them. To rise to this substantial challenge, SUEZ has joined forces with Eramet to build a lithium-ion battery recycling plant on the shores of the English Channel.

An ambitious plan has come to fruition in Dunkirk’s Grand Port Maritime, with a key milestone reached in the development of the innovative electric vehicle battery recycling process that was initiated by the two partners in 2019. Eramet (the European mining and metallurgical leader) and SUEZ have decided to set up their joint project ReLieVe in the heart of “Battery Valley”. Here is where gigafactories are being built to address, as of 2025, this key challenge of the green transition – the mass production of EV batteries – squared with the reality of exploitable and available resources.

As a leader in the waste sector, we provide innovative solutions to limit the consumption of virgin raw materials and secure supplies of secondary raw materials.

Sabrina Soussan , Chairman and CEO of SUEZ

Securing supplies of the metals necessary for the energy transition in Europe

This project, supported by an €80 million European Union and BPI grant (to firstly finance pre-industrialization studies, followed by plant construction and operating costs for the first 10 years), will enable the strategic metals used in batteries to be recycled in a closed loop, helping to secure the metal supplies needed for Europe’s energy transition.

ReLieVe helps to pre-empt the pitfall of dependency on the rare metals making up electric vehicle batteries, also addressing the need for resource sobriety. From 2031, these batteries must contain at least 16% of recycled cobalt and 6% of recycled lithium and nickel. This is an ambitious goal that requires the combined industrial expertise of the two leaders in their respective domains, which will be developed in two complementary plants.

Goal: 50,000 tonnes of lithium-ion battery modules recycled

In this project, SUEZ will dismantle batteries upstream to produce black mass, a powder that contains reusable lithium, cobalt and nickel oxides. Eramet will work downstream, using the hydrometallurgy process to extract and refine these strategic metals with a view to their industrial reuse. This process is being tested in its Research and Innovation centre in Trappes (west of Paris) in an 800-sqm pilot plant, a reduced-scale replica of ReLieVe. The full-scale plant’s annual recycling capacity amounts to 50,000 tonnes of modules, or the equivalent of 200,000 EV batteries. “As a responsible mining player, our role is to develop this resource and give it a second life, with a considerably reduced environmental impact”, adds Christel Bories, Chairwoman and CEO of Eramet.

With the combined expertise of the two partners, the performances expected from ReLieVe offer the prospects of meeting or surpassing European legal requirements, which specify a 50% recycling rate for lithium by 2027 (80% by 2031) and a 90% rate for cobalt, copper and nickel (up to 95% four years later).

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