On Monday, Singapore’s TES, the global electronic waste (e-waste) recycler owned since 2013 by Southeast Asia private equity investor Navis Capital and that currently operates more than 42 facilities around the world, announced a major European expansion bid. The company has secured an 110,000 sq.-foot battery recycling facility at Europe’s largest seaport, the Port of Rotterdam.
The facility, located adjacent to the waterways of Rotterdam port, carries an option to extend onto a neighboring plot that will triple the site’s footprint to around 430,000 sq. ft. The site already conveys a basic waste license to receive, store and forward lithium batteries and to manage electric vehicle batteries and battery production scrap, as well as a license to shred alkaline batteries.
The site is expected to be fully operational by late 2022, becoming the first lithium battery recycling plant in the Netherlands. TES currently operates two other lithium battery recycling facilities, one in Grenoble, France and the other in Singapore.
The TES site in Grenoble was one of the first recycling sites to use an inert shredding process that safely crushes lithium batteries and developed a number of key patents for hydrometallurgical processes.
In March of this year, TES’s facility in Singapore became Southeast Asia’s first lithium battery recycling facility, with daily recycling capacity of up to 14 tons of lithium batteries, equivalent to 280,000 smartphone batteries.
TES says these existing facilities will support the development of the new, larger-scale site in the Port of Rotterdam, with their combined capacity became TES one of the largest service providers of lithium battery recycling globally, as well as one of the largest generators of commodity materials produced from the battery recycling process.
In a statement announcing the deal on Monday, TES said the Port of Rotterdam project is part of its ongoing commitment to improve the collection and recycling of portable and industrial batteries in Europe, in support of the European Union’s goals as expressed in the European Green Deal.
Global demand for lithium batteries is expected to skyrocket as car manufacturers boost electric vehicle (EV) production by as much as 14-fold by 2030 (compared to 2018 levels), with the EU alone potentially accounting for 17 percent of global demand for lithium ion batteries: the second highest share worldwide.
TES cited a December 2020 report from U.K. battery research consultancy Circular Energy Storage which concluded that Europe is currently “under capacity” for sustainable lithium battery recycling, and will need more capacity to meet waste generation needs by 2030.
“We have a vision to be a global sustainability innovator, and our unwavering ambition to turn the Port of Rotterdam site into a state-of-the-art European battery recycling facility is key in delivering that strategy,” said Thomas Holberg, Global VP of Battery Operations at TES, in a statement on the deal. “Once up and running, we will have up to 10,000 tonnes of shredding capacity per year and a subsequent hydrometallurgical process which focuses on the recovery of nickel, cobalt, and lithium as a precursor feedstock for the battery industry.”
“We are working not only towards a net zero CO2 emission port and industry in 2050 but also looking at ways to make the industry more circular,” Port of Rotterdam CEO Allard Castelein said. “Besides working on projects regarding, for instance, hydrogen and carbon capture and storage, it is important to take significant steps to establish circular production processes. The TES project in Rotterdam is exactly that. This could very well become the largest European facility for recycling batteries from electric cars.”
