The Bulletin Board – LYTEN

Lyten buys one of Europe’s biggest battery recyclers

Lyten

The American lithium-sulfur company Lyten is acquiring the Revolt recycling plant in northern Sweden, adding one of Europe’s largest battery recyclers to the industrial hub it is building on the old Northvolt site.

Lyten, the US company best known for its lithium-sulfur batteries, is acquiring Revolt, the former Northvolt recycling plant at Skellefteå in northern Sweden, and with it one of Europe’s largest fully integrated battery recyclers.

The plant has an installed capacity of 8,500 tonnes a year, runs entirely on fossil-free power, and sits directly alongside Lyten’s gigafactory at Skellefteå. It recovers lithium, cobalt, nickel and manganese, the materials that go back into new cells. The deal follows Lyten’s acquisition of Northvolt Ett and Northvolt Labs earlier in the year, and is being funded from equity investment.

The logic is straightforward. Lyten is assembling an industrial hub on the site the collapsed Northvolt left behind, restarting lithium-ion manufacturing, adding recycling, and even acquiring a neighbouring data-centre site. Owning a recycler feeds directly into a stated aim: reducing the mined-mineral content of its batteries by recovering what is already in circulation. As chief executive Dan Cook put it, the plant is a piece in enabling Europe’s battery supply-chain independence.

It is also a telling moment for the industry. Northvolt was meant to be Europe’s answer to Asian battery dominance, and its failure was a hard one. That its assets are being picked up and restarted, rather than left to rust, is a better outcome than the headlines of a year ago suggested. For an industry that depends on building capacity at home, seeing a recycler like Revolt brought back into use is exactly the kind of development worth marking.

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