SK Ecoplant, BMW team up for battery recycling

SK Ecoplant Co., a South Korean construction engineering and waste management company under SK Group, partnered with German luxury carmaker BMW to recycle batteries for electric vehicles (EVs).

SK Ecoplant's battery recycling subsidiary, SK tes, uses lithium, cobalt, and nickel extracted from BMW's EVs waste batteries to produce new ones.

BMW Group will supply SK tes with waste EV batteries and scrap from Europe in the second half of this year. 

SK tech will post-process the black mass from the crushed waste batteries to extract rare metals such as lithium, cobalt, and nickel, and use them to manufacture new batteries.

This is the first partnership with a global finished car maker.

SK tes plans to utilize its Rotterdam battery recycling plant in the Netherlands, completed in September last year, as a base for the project.

Located in the Rotterdam harbor district, the plant covers an area of 10,000 square meters and is the largest global battery recycling plant.

It can recycle batteries for 40,000 EVs per year and produce up to 10,000 tons of black mass annually.

Write to Hyung-Kyu Kim at khk@hankyung.com