SMM commissions Japan's 1st EV battery recycling plant

Market: Battery materials, Metals
15/09/26

Sumitomo Metal Mining (SMM) has commissioned Japan's first battery recycling plant in the country's Ehime prefecture.

The facility is the country's first commercial-scale operation capable of recovering nickel, cobalt, lithium and copper from spent lithium-ion batteries used in electric vehicles (EVs) and other applications, it told Argus today.

The recycling scheme "will contribute to the realisation of a circular economy and a carbon-neutral society by making effective use of critical minerals such as nickel, cobalt, copper and lithium, which are finite resources," an SMM representative told Argus.

The plant's different processes are located across two sites in Ehime — SMM's Toyo smelter in Saijo city and nickel refinery in Niihama city. It has a processing capacity equivalent to around 10,000 t/yr of battery cells. This is equivalent to batteries used in around 60,000 EVs with 40kWh battery packs, according to the company. Full-scale operations are expected to begin in fiscal year 2028. The company did not disclose the investment figure or recovery volumes or rates for individual metals.

Recovered nickel and cobalt will be processed into a high-purity nickel-cobalt mixed solution and supplied to SMM's Isoura plant for use as feedstock for battery cathode materials. SMM is working with chemical producer Kanto Denka Kogyo to combine its smelting and refining technologies with Kanto Denka's high-purity lithium recovery technology, aiming to establish a "battery-to-battery" recycling system in which recovered metals are reused in new battery materials.

Feedstock will be sourced from both domestic and overseas markets. In addition to black mass — a concentrated material produced by crushing, neutralising and processing spent batteries — the facility will also accept battery manufacturing scrap.

The government and industry established a battery industry strategy in 2022, targeting battery manufacturing capacity of 150 GWh/yr in Japan and 600 GWh/yr globally by 2030. Japan's economy, trade and industry ministry (Meti) estimates that achieving 600 GWh/yr of global battery manufacturing capacity would require 380,000 t/yr of lithium, 310,000 t/yr of nickel, 60,000 t/yr of cobalt, 600,000 t/yr of graphite and 50,000 t/yr of manganese.

By Fumito Nagase

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