The most decisive company in battery recycling is a lead one

From 18 August 2031, the EU’s recycled content targets apply to industrial batteries above 2 kWh, EV batteries and SLI batteries: 16 per cent of the cobalt, 6 per cent of the lithium and 6 per cent of the nickel in them must come from recovered waste, and where a battery contains lead, 85 per cent of it must be recycled. Somebody has to produce that recycled material, and the companies that can are still rare.

The build

Now watch what Ecobat did. A company that has recycled lead batteries for decades, its lead business said it fully recycled 70 million car batteries in 2021 alone, decided lithium was next and brought three lithium recycling plants fully operational within twelve months of each other, in Germany, Arizona and England.

Twelve months. In an industry where even well-funded newcomers have struggled, Northvolt went bankrupt and Li-Cycle passed through creditor protection into Glencore’s hands, a lead recycler quietly commissioned three plants on two continents in a year: Hettstedt in late 2023, Casa Grande in April 2024, Darlaston in November 2024, and all three announced fully operational in April 2025. That’s not luck. That’s what happens when the collection logistics, the safe handling and the regulatory experience already exist and just get pointed at a new chemistry.

The plants produce black mass, the crushed and processed material recovered from spent lithium-ion batteries that’s rich in lithium, cobalt, nickel, manganese and graphite, and the main form in which old lithium batteries re-enter the supply chain.

The edit

Then Ecobat did the thing most companies never manage: it chose. Through 2025 and into 2026 it sold its European lead business piece by piece, France to Campine, Italy to Haiki, the UK to Splitstone Capital, and Germany and Austria to Clarios, a sale completed in May 2026 that Ecobat described as its exit from the European lead market. In the same month it sold the Darlaston lithium plant to Mulberry Waste Holdings, a British company, keeping Hettstedt and Casa Grande.

It’s easy to read a string of sales as retreat. This isn’t that. Every one of those plants sold as a going concern to a buyer who wanted it, and Ecobat came out the other side a focused business rather than a sprawling one. Knowing what to sell is as much a skill as knowing what to build, and it’s the rarer of the two.

Everyone came out ahead

Here’s the part I find genuinely cheering. Nothing closed. Clarios picked up a proven European lead recycling network. Campine and Haiki grew. A lithium plant in the Black Country is now British-owned. The capability a lead company spent decades building didn’t leave the industry, it got redistributed to owners who wanted it most, right as the 2031 targets make that capability more valuable every year.

The Ledger

The battery recycling story is usually told as shiny lithium startups versus a legacy industry. Ecobat just showed the legacy industry is where the actual competence lives. It moved faster than companies a fraction of its age, sold better than most conglomerates, and left the whole map stronger than it found it.

So here’s the question for the recyclers: what’s the constraint now, the supply of end-of-life batteries, or the demand for black mass?