Watercycle Technologies has secured £1 million of UK government grant funding for CAMCYCLE, a £2 million programme intended to shorten the route from end-of-life lithium-ion batteries to recycled cathode active material. The 12-month project, delivered with CPI, will combine battery recycling and cathode-material production while recovering useful minerals from wastewater generated during processing.
Conventional lithium-ion battery recycling can involve dismantling and shredding cells into black mass, separating or refining individual metals, converting those materials into battery-grade chemicals, and subsequently rebuilding them into precursor and cathode materials. Watercycle says its proposed route removes at least three stages by linking recycling more directly with cathode active material production.
The project will also treat wastewater from the recycling process rather than regarding it simply as an effluent stream. Mineral content will be recovered and fed back into production where possible, increasing the proportion of material retained within the process and reducing the number of separate recovery operations required around the core battery stream.
CAMCYCLE is funded through the DRIVE35 Innovation Fund: Demonstrate 2 competition and will be led by Watercycle with process-innovation organisation CPI. The work will also support upgrades to Watercycle’s pilot facility, giving the company equipment and process data that can inform subsequent commercial-scale systems rather than ending with a laboratory demonstration.
The programme follows Watercycle’s ReCAM project, which is developing a patented short-loop route for converting battery black mass directly into cathode active material instead of completely separating the feed into individual metals before reconstructing the cathode chemistry. ReCAM involves the UK Battery Industrialisation Centre, Recyclus Group, and Polaron, with development centred on modular equipment capable of handling around 250kg of material per hour.
The distinction between recovering metal and manufacturing qualified cathode material is important. A recycler can extract valuable lithium, nickel, cobalt, and manganese but still leave the higher-value stages of refining, precursor manufacture, and cathode production outside the UK. Watercycle’s route is intended to retain more of that conversion chain domestically by producing material closer to the specification needed for new cells.
The technical burden rises as the product moves closer to a battery. Recycled feed is inherently variable, contaminants have to be controlled, and the chemistry and physical characteristics of the resulting cathode material must remain within narrow limits if a cell manufacturer is expected to qualify it. Throughput alone is therefore a poor measure of success unless purity, recovery, reagent use, energy demand, and batch consistency are maintained alongside it.
Watercycle estimates that growth in the UK’s electric-vehicle market could produce as much as 94,000 tonnes of black mass annually by 2040. Those batteries contain minerals that have already passed through mining, refining, transport, and cell manufacture once, giving recycling a potential role in reducing exposure to imported primary material while retaining more industrial value from end-of-life packs.
The company is developing a second programme around lithium recovery from waste streams. It recently secured £3 million of government grant support towards the £6 million ReLiVE project, a 36-month programme intended to recover battery-grade lithium from industrial wastewater and battery-recycling streams using Watercycle’s DLEC technology. ReLiVE is scheduled to begin in April 2027 and will build a pilot-to-demonstration-scale lithium production facility.
CAMCYCLE, ReCAM, and ReLiVE address different parts of the same processing chain. One focuses on shortening the path from black mass to cathode material, another develops the underlying short-loop recycling equipment, and the third concentrates on lithium recovery. Connecting those stages is potentially more useful than building isolated recycling processes whose outputs still need to be shipped elsewhere for further refining.
Earlier UK vehicle-manufacturing funding has already backed several projects moving battery materials, motors, controls, and other electrification technologies towards industrial scale. CAMCYCLE is smaller than a commercial cathode plant, but it is aimed at one of the more expensive gaps in a circular battery chain: turning a recovered mixture into a controlled manufacturing input.
The 12-month programme now has to establish whether the shorter process can maintain the required recovery and material quality outside a laboratory. If it does, the next step will be less glamorous and more consequential — designing equipment that can run repeatedly at industrial throughput without giving back the cost and environmental savings through poor yield, excessive reagents, or difficult quality control.
