SungEel HiTech & Samsung plan battery recycling in Germany
In Germany, Samsung and the South Korean recycling specialist SungEel HiTech want to build a battery recycling plant in the Gera-Cretzschwitz industrial park in the federal state of Thuringia. The plant should have the capacity to recycle 20,000 tons of lithium-ion batteries annually.
Construction of the €45 million battery recycling plant in Gera will start in March 2024. The first of two production lines should go into operation in early 2025, the second in early 2027. According to media reports, old batteries will be dismantled, crushed and dried on site. The materials are subsequently separated in a mechanical process to leave only raw materials that can be used for new batteries.
As reported by the German publications Die Zeit and mdr.de, the joint venture between SungEel HiTech and Samsung had initially been planned for a site in the Thuringian municipality of Rudolstadt, located further southwest of Gera. The plan failed, partly due to massive local objections. In Gera, the city council supported the project in a decisive vote only by a narrow majority.
The plant is to be built in the Gera-Cretzschwitz industrial park on an area of around 30,000 square meters and will provide 100 jobs. The planned construction by the South Korean partners will be the second large recycling plant for electric vehicle batteries in the German state, since Finnish company Fortum is also building a battery recycling hub in Thuringia.
Recycling specialist SungEel HiTech has so far been a familiar name in connection with a battery recycling joint venture within Korea that SungEel fairly recently initiated with SK Innovation. The joint venture is expected to combine SK Innovation’s independently developed lithium hydroxide recovery technology and SungEel HiTech’s nickel, cobalt and manganese recovery technology to “secure a differentiated competitive advantage in the fast-growing market,” according to SK Innovation’s statement at the time.
SungEel HiTech is considered a recycling-focused company that made its stock market debut in the summer of 2022. It is the only company in Korea that recovers cobalt, nickel, manganese and copper from lithium-ion batteries in a large-scale hydrometallurgical plant, it said at the inter-Korean JV announcement last year.
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