Pavia (Italy) – 8th and 9th February 2024. The members of the RENOVATE project gathered two consecutive days for its official kick-off meeting at the University of Pavia. The meeting aimed at planning the first and upcoming research activities and discussing the expected outcomes that will boost the recycling and re-use of batteries, cell materials, and related components. The ultimate goal is to foster new circular economy solutions for the European battery value chain.

RENOVATE is funded by Horizon Europe, the European Union’s key programme for Research and Innovation, part of which addresses Climate, Energy, and Mobility.

The meeting was hosted by the project coordinator, the National Interuniversity Consortium of Materials Science and Technology – INSTM the biggest network in Italy working on material research, involving 52 Italian universities and 3000 researchers. In it participated Politecnico di Milano , Iberian Centre for Research in Energy Storage – CIIAE, Helmholtz Institute Ulm HIU Electrochemical Energy Storage, founded by the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, SYENSQO, SVOLT, BALance Technology Consulting, ERP Italia Servizi, LOMARTOV, FAAM, and Organik Kimya, including the University of Pavia and the University of Milano-Bicocca as associated partners.

RENOVATE members, through their direct involvement in circular batteries and chemical processing, focus on recycling processes and performance, to achieve the closed-loop circular approach. In parallel, they aim to communicate and disseminate their work to a large audience, specialists, and nonspecialists for a wider impact of the project.

The project consortium had the opportunity to visit the R2BATT Lab “Batteries Recycling and Reuse” of the Department of Chemistry of the University of Pavia and see the R&D laboratory in which several RENOVATE activities will be performed.

RENOVATE is a three-year project, whose final goal is to validate novel, innovative, and sustainable recycling technologies at Technology Readiness Level 4, meaning the technology will be validated at a laboratory level. The aim is also to accelerate the integration of recycled contents (including production scraps) as secondary raw materials into the manufacturing of new cells. The environmental and economic impacts of the technologies will be assessed using methods of the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Life Cycle Costing (LCC), allowing to find strategies for a higher recovery performance.