Portugal’s first lithium batteries and battery recycling plant is installed in Braga and has an installed processing capacity of up to 7,000 tonnes per year, avoiding the need to resort to foreign resources, it was announced today.
This is b.again, from the dst group, which today hosted the Electrão Open Day and which carries the motto “transforming the end into a new beginning.”
“Basically, it is about taking advantage of the batteries we no longer need, but which still have useful critical raw materials for the future, to manufacture new batteries or to manufacture other advanced materials. Recover these raw materials from the batteries we no longer use and value them again,” explained the CEO of b.again, João Gomes.
The executive stressed that batteries are mines, even when they no longer serve the purposes for which they were designed.
“The batteries we already have are also mines, where we can recover these critical raw materials and avoid having to rely so much on virgin raw materials,” he said.
b.again has a storage area of 2,000 square metres and an instantaneous processing capacity of 500 tonnes.
João Gomes said that at b.again the materials are not burned, but recovered.
“It is a way of recovering critical raw materials to manufacture new devices, without the need to dig holes in the ground,” he added.
The technology used is based on a dry mechanical crushing process, performed at low temperature, pressure and in an inert atmosphere, allowing material recovery rates higher than 95%.
The recovered materials can be reintegrated into different industrial value chains, with emphasis on the recovery of critical and strategic raw materials used in the production of new batteries, contributing to a more circular and sustainable value chain.
The 7,000 tonnes that the company can treat per year result in about 3,500 tonnes of “black mass,” from which critical materials such as lithium, graphite, cobalt and nickel are extracted.
This extraction is carried out in France, in kinds of “refineries” that do not yet exist in Portugal.
“In the short/medium term, we hope it will already be possible to do this here,” added João Gomes.
At b.again, the recycling of lithium batteries began in March, and around 500 tonnes of material have already been processed there.
The factory currently employs 23 workers.
The CEO of Electrão, Ricardo Furtado, emphasized that battery recycling allows the recovery of several materials and reduces the need to extract new resources, helping to reduce Europe’s dependence on imported raw materials.
“The challenge is no longer only environmental. It is also strategic and economic. The more we manage to collect and recycle, the greater the future availability of these raw materials to support the energy and digital transitions,” he said.
The operational partnership between Electrão and b.again allows treating those wastes in Portugal, reducing the need to resort to facilities abroad, strengthening the national recycling industry and contributing to the development of a national value chain linked to battery recycling.
b.again has specialized logistical capacity for the collection and transport of batteries across the entire national territory, including solutions tailored to the different battery types and safety conditions.
