The Bulletin Board – cylib, Porsche to Porsche

From Porsche to Porsche: a battery recycled back into itself

cylib · Porsche

cylib and Porsche have made battery cells from cathode material that is 100% recycled, and recovered from Porsche’s own worn-out batteries. A car company recycling its batteries back into new ones is exactly the loop the industry has been promising.

The German recycler cylib and Porsche have reached a milestone that sounds simple and is not: they have made battery cells using cathode material recovered entirely from Porsche’s own end-of-life batteries. From Porsche to Porsche, and back again.

For the first time in the pilot project, recycled materials fully replaced the freshly mined ones. The lithium, nickel, cobalt and manganese in the new cells all came out of Porsche high-voltage batteries that had reached the end of their first life, recovered and processed rather than dug up. The cells are now going through operational testing.

“cylib closes the battery recycling loop, from end-of-life batteries to recovered raw materials,” said Dr Lilian Schwich, Co-CEO and co-founder of cylib. “The pilot project with Porsche demonstrates that our approach is feasible in practice.”

That word, feasible, is the whole point. A closed loop for batteries has been talked about for years. The harder question was always whether recycled material could come back clean enough, and in the right form, to go into a new high-performance cell. This is a real answer to it: not a lab result, but cells made and now being tested.

The practical machinery behind it is already running. Since May, cylib has been recycling end-of-life Porsche batteries collected from Porsche Centers across Germany, using a water-based process. The recovered materials are tracked through a dedicated account and set to be available for new cell production from 2028. The aim, beyond the neat symmetry of Porsche-to-Porsche, is a more resilient European supply of the materials batteries depend on, recovered at home rather than imported.

It is the kind of development the industry should be marking. Recycling has spent a long time being treated as the afterthought at the end of the battery’s life. Work like this puts it where it belongs, at the start of the next one.

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