BMW launches EV battery recycling in Australia

The BMW Group has established a new recycling program for its electric vehicle (EV) batteries in Australia.

The company has collaborated with Australian battery recycler EcoBatt to recycle high-voltage lithium-ion EV batteries that have been recovered from customers’ vehicles through the national BMW Group dealer network. The program covers batteries that have either been damaged or reached the end of their operational life.

The announcement follows EcoBatt’s unveiling of the Lithium Battery and Battery-in-Devices Shredding (BIDS) Plant at its headquarters in Campbellfield, Victoria.

The new facility bolsters existing recycling operations by using advanced shredding and separation technology to recover more than 90% of valuable materials, including metals and plastics, for reuse. It also has the capacity to process up to 5000 tonnes of batteries and embedded batteries annually.

The Campbellfield plant is the first of several BIDS facilities to be commissioned across the region, with new locations also planned for Western Australia and New Zealand.

The process for recycling BMW and MINI high-voltage EV batteries begins by transporting them from BMW dealer partners to EcoBatt’s Battery Discharge Plant. There, the batteries are discharged to safely remove residual energy — thereby removing the thermal risk — prior to recycling.

Any recovered energy from that process is captured and reused in the facility’s operations to minimise the carbon output of the recycling process.

The batteries are then mechanically shredded at the BIDS plant, which now enables greater efficiency and a higher level of raw material extraction, with materials such as casings, plastics and metals separated for further recycling.

The recycling process generates black mass, a valuable material containing lithium, cobalt, nickel, manganese and graphite.

The black mass is supplied to downstream refiners, where the minerals and elements are recovered and returned to manufacturing supply chains to produce new high-voltage batteries.

The announcement of the new recycling scheme in Australia is in alignment with similar efforts conducted by the BMW Group on a global scale. In Germany, the BMW Group has a long-term partnership with SK tes — a leading provider of technology lifecycle solutions — to recover cobalt, nickel and lithium from used batteries and re-integrate the materials into the supply chain to produce new batteries.

Image caption: Dismantling an EV battery. Image: Supplied.