The Munich startup’s demo plant at Chemical Park Gendorf in Bavaria processes 1,500 tonnes of battery waste a year and produces 100 tonnes of high-purity lithium carbonate, at costs the company says are twice as competitive as conventional miners. A full-scale facility capable of 45,000 tonnes per year is planned for 2030.
Europe has a battery problem it can’t see. Parked in driveways, stacked in garages, decomposing in junkyards across the continent are tens of thousands of end-of-life electric vehicles containing the very lithium, graphite, and nickel-cobalt that European manufacturers are scrambling to source from abroad.
Until now, no company had a process capable of recovering those materials at industrial scale. tozero, a Munich-based deeptech startup founded in 2022, says it has one, and today it switched it on.
The company has launched its industrial demonstration plant at Chemical Park Gendorf in Bavaria, a site that provides the plug-and-play industrial infrastructure that allowed tozero to commission the facility in around six months.
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The plant can process more than 1,500 tonnes of battery waste per year and produce over 100 tonnes of high-purity lithium carbonate annually.
Unlike conventional pyrometallurgical recycling processes that recover copper and aluminium while losing lithium and graphite, tozero’s proprietary acid-free hydrometallurgical process runs in a single cycle and produces materials pure enough to feed directly back into battery cell manufacturing without further refinement.
The commercial milestones are real and independently verified. In April 2024, nine months after opening its Munich pilot facility, tozero became the first company in Europe to deliver recycled lithium to commercial customers.
In February 2025 it became the first in Europe to qualify 100% recycled graphite for use in lithium-ion battery cell production at industrial scale.
The demo plant now brings both achievements together at a new order of magnitude, and will serve as the blueprint for a full-scale commercial facility targeting 45,000 tonnes of battery waste per year, with production of around 8,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate and approximately 10,000 tonnes of graphite, planned for 2030.
tozero was founded in July 2022 by Sarah Fleischer, a serial entrepreneur and mechanical engineer who had previously launched an early-stage VC and startup incubator at the Luxembourg Space Agency, and Dr. Ksenija Milicevic Neumann, a metallurgy expert whose breakthrough research at RWTH Aachen University, published in Nature, forms the technical basis of the company’s process.
The company has completed pilots with BMW, MAN, and other automotive OEMs demonstrating a stable lithium recovery rate exceeding 80%, a figure that already meets the EU’s mandatory target for 2031 under the Battery Directive.
Its investor base includes NordicNinja, Atlantic Labs, Honda, JGC Group via Mirai Corporate Venture Capital, Verve Ventures, Possible Ventures, and In-Q-Tel, the strategic investment arm of the US intelligence community, alongside a €2.5 million EIC Accelerator grant. Total funding is approximately €17 million.
The geopolitical context makes the timing significant. China controls the vast majority of the world’s graphite supply and processes the overwhelming share of global lithium; Europe remains almost entirely import-dependent for both.
The EU Critical Raw Materials Act mandates that 25% of supply come from recycling, a target that battery recyclers like tozero are being built to meet. Global lithium demand is projected to quadruple by 2030, driven by EV growth and grid-scale energy storage, while demand for graphite in the EU alone could rise by up to 25 times by 2040.
The Gendorf plant is a small but meaningful first industrial answer to a supply problem Europe has yet to seriously address at scale.
Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.
