Two deals between the same two companies
Umicore, a Belgian materials company, recycles used batteries and leftover material from battery factories, and separately makes cathode material, the manufactured layer inside a battery that stores and carries the charge. Automotive Cells Company, known as ACC, is a cell maker started in 2020 by Stellantis and TotalEnergies, with Mercedes Benz joining as a 3rd owner in September 2021. Umicore and ACC have 2 separate agreements. The first, signed in February 2022, sends factory scrap, leftover material from making battery cells rather than a battery taken out of a car, from the ACC pilot plant in Nersac, France, to the Umicore Hoboken plant in Belgium for recycling. A pilot plant is a small factory built to test production before a full sized one. The second agreement, made in March 2023, has ACC buying high nickel cathode material from the Umicore Nysa plant in Poland, reaching 46 gigawatt hours a year by 2030. A gigawatt hour measures how much energy a battery can store. Umicore states that volume is enough cathode material for about 500,000 electric vehicles a year.
Battery recycling is a key ingredient of sustainable electric mobility and is fully in line with Umicore's overall closed loop philosophy.
Denis Goffaux, Executive Vice President of Umicore. Source 1.
What Hoboken recycles and recovers
The Umicore Hoboken plant recycles 7,000 tonnes of battery material a year. The current Umicore recycling page states that volume is equal to about 20,000 electric car batteries a year. Once scrap arrives, Umicore breaks it down and recovers the metals inside so they can go into new batteries instead of being mined again. Umicore recovers cobalt, copper and nickel at more than 95%, and lithium at more than 90%.
Figures are the minimum share Umicore states it recovers for each metal, not an exact figure.
Show the numbers
| Cobalt | 95 |
| Copper | 95 |
| Nickel | 95 |
| Lithium | 90 |
The material moving through this agreement today is factory scrap, not a battery pulled from a retired car. ACC cells are recent enough that none has yet reached the end of a car life.
The agreement between ACC for Nersac and Umicore fits perfectly into this framework, allowing us to improve our expertise, locally, regarding the recycling of our production waste.
Gilles Tardivo, Vice President of the Nersac pilot plant at Automotive Cells Company. Source 1.
What ACC buys back from Umicore
The Umicore Nysa plant makes cathode material for electric vehicle batteries, opened as the first such plant in Europe. Production at the plant is targeted to grow from 20 gigawatt hours a year by the end of 2023, to 40 gigawatt hours in 2024, and potentially more than 200 gigawatt hours a year in the second half of this decade. Umicore says that top figure is enough for about 3,000,000 electric vehicles a year.
All 3 figures are targets Umicore stated for the Nysa plant total capacity in 2023, not shipped tonnage, and are separate from the 46 gigawatt hour volume Automotive Cells Company has contracted for by 2030.
Show the numbers
| End of 2023 | 20 |
| 2024 | 40 |
| Second half of the decade | 200 |
Within that total, ACC has contracted 46 gigawatt hours a year by 2030. That figure is a target stated in a 2023 release, not a tonnage Umicore has shipped yet.
Two deals, not one proven loop
No source confirms that the metal Umicore recovers from ACC scrap is the metal that comes back to ACC as cathode material. These are 2 separate, dated agreements between the same 2 companies, moving material in opposite directions, not 1 traced loop audited end to end. The recycling agreement has been running since February 2022. The cathode agreement adds a 2030 target on top of it, not a tonnage shipped today.