A Commercial Scale Example of a Cradle-to-Gate Lithium-ion Recycling Platform.
And it’s in Europe.
Accurec-Recycling GmbH uses the very intriguing term “pyrolytic opening” in one of their patents for lithium-ion recycling. This term aptly describes the specific mechanism that occurs during one of the stages of their process.
Accurec, located in Krefeld, Germany, puts lithium-ion cells into a kiln and heats them up. This initiates the one thing no one ever wants to happen: thermal runaway. Inside the platform, however, a self-sustaining conflagration never occurs because the entire reaction is run in three carefully controlled heat stages inside a reducing atmosphere, an oxygen-poor environment that impedes combustion while still letting the materials reduce chemically.
Those three stages are implemented also for a economic reason: the controlled heat increase allows the capture of nearly all the potential energy in the electrolytes and plastics by burning the extracted gases to fuel the kiln, making the process virtually autothermal, with 60–80% of the energy produced from these gases. This also has the added benefit of making it a low-emission platform.
But where does “pyrolytic opening” actually come into play?
It’s literally the off-gassing that does it.
As the kiln temperature rises under the reducing atmosphere, the exothermic reactions (SEI breakdown, electrolyte reaction with lithiated graphite, etc.) start releasing large volumes of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, hydrogen, and hydrocarbon gases from the electrolyte and binders. These gases are generated inside the sealed cells faster than they can diffuse out through the casing seams or safety vents.
The internal pressure builds rapidly, causing the cells to swell until the casing eventually fails. This physical rupture from thermal off-gassing is exactly what Accurec calls pyrolytic opening.
This procedure achieves several goals at once: it fully discharges and inertizes the cells so they can be safely shredded, decomposes the organic components (electrolyte solvents like ethylene carbonate and binders like PVDF), and calcines the cathode active material in a reducing atmosphere all of which makes the subsequent metal extraction far easier and more efficient.
If this sounds familiar, it is similar to the process Redwood Materials uses. They call it reductive calcination. It harnesses the heat and gases produced when a cell goes into thermal runaway to break down the cell and further supplement the kiln heat. Based on the amount of hydrocarbons listed in an emissions report for their TRIC facility, American Battery Technology Company (ABTC) uses a version of this process. They do it without a kiln or external heat by damaging the cells or causing a short to force them to fail, but the result is the same: an inert cell that has been thermally reduced to allow easier and more cost-effective extraction of the cathode metals.
After the pyrolytic opening step, Accurec leaches the thermally treated black mass in hydrochloric acid (HCl). They slowly add the black mass to the acid the dissolution reaction is strongly exothermic and heats the slurry above 95 °C on its own. As more black mass is added, the basic oxide species in the calcined cathode material gradually neutralize the acid, so the pH naturally rises to around 4.5. At that point lithium, nickel, cobalt and manganese are fully dissolved while copper, aluminium, graphite and iron remain in the solid residue. The solution is filtered, and the clean pregnant leach liquor then undergoes conventional solvent extraction to sequentially pull out the transition metals.
The reason I am writing about Accurec this morning is that they have expanded their recycling platform to include an electrochemical component using a ceramic membrane for final battery-grade lithium hydroxide monohydrate (LiOH·H₂O) production.
This selective ceramic membrane setup has also been proposed for use in Direct Lithium Extraction (DLE) from continental, geothermal, and oilfield brines (e.g., DOE prize-winning pilots like Pober-Strauss’s lithium-conducting membranes and Xerion’s ceramic redox membranes). A 2024 PNAS study reports a three-chamber electrochemical reactor with a lithium-ion conductive glass-ceramic membrane achieving 97.5% Li⁺ selectivity from simulated brines. These remain largely at pilot or lab scale, with full commercial battery-grade LiOH production from brines using ceramic membranes still under development.
In Accurec’s case, they state this component of their platform is near industrial scale with realistic full commercial scale deployment in 2026. Their system, named EarLi (Extraction and Purification of Lithium Hydroxide Monohydrate), developed by Accurec in collaboration with Evonik Operations GmbH, the IME Process Metallurgy and Metal Recycling Institute at RWTH Aachen University, and Öko‑Institut e.V., recovers lithium from thermally treated black mass.
Li⁺ are selectively transported across a lithium-ion-conductive ceramic membrane into the catholyte (typically very dilute LiOH in high-purity water).The Li⁺ then react with OH⁻ in the catholyte to form battery-grade LiOH·H₂O, which contains approximately 57% LiOH by mass.
While similar to ABTC’s electrochemical LiOH production, this is not a bipolar-membrane electrodialysis (BMED) system, so no acid regeneration occurs. Residual HCl in the feed is concentrated on the anode side and recycled to the leaching stage, with fresh HCl added to compensate for losses. The low-voltage ceramic membrane keeps overall energy demand significantly lower than a BMED system, offsetting the cost of replacing consumed and neutralized HCl.
As for profitability Accurec GmbH is privately held and does not disclose financials, however a November 2025 perspective in npj Materials Sustainability, titled “Lithium ion battery recycling: a perspective on key challenges and opportunities,” offers economic indicators to infer its profitability. The analysis highlights that hydrometallurgical recycling, Accurec’s flagship process at its Krefeld facility, delivers net margins of $0.4 to $3.3 per kg of processed material after $1.3 per kg costs, including full overheads and recovery rates above 95% for cobalt and nickel from spent lithium ion batteries.
With Accurec’s emphasis on cobalt-rich feeds from consumer electronics, such as LCO (Lithium Cobalt Oxide) packs in smartphones and laptops that yield high-value cobalt at 18 to 20% content, this converts into strong per-ton economics under 2025 prices, with cobalt at $50 per kg. With the Krefeld plant’s initial 4,000tpa (tons per annum) throughput of spent batteries but permitted up to 60,000tpa, Accurec should be able to continue scheduled expansions over the course of the next year so that they exceed the study’s 7,000tpa break-even for hydromet operations, placing it firmly in the profitable tier amid cobalt’s rebound and Europe’s tightening battery regulations.
Accurec’s facility in Krefeld, Germany, is a strong example of a cradle-to-gate recycler whose RWTH Aachen-certified processes already surpass the current trivial EU recycling recovery rates for lithium-ion, achieving greater than 90% recycling efficiency. This positions the company to eventually support a fully circular supply chain for lithium-ion in Europe.
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DISCLAIMER: This article should not be construed as an offering of investment advice, nor should any statements (by the author or by other persons and/or entities that the author has included) in this article be taken as investment advice or recommendations of any investment strategy. The information in this article is for educational purposes only. The author did not receive compensation from any of the companies mentioned to be included in the article.