BMW Group has agreed to establish a global EV battery recycling network in partnership with South Korea’s SK Ecoplant Company, in response to rising global sales of electrified vehicles.
The German automaker launched its first recycling operation for EV battery raw materials at its BMW Brilliance Automotive joint venture in China in 2022. At the end of last year, the company agreed establish a global battery recycling network in partnership with SK tes, SK Ecoplant’s recycling unit, starting with the establishment of a “pan- European” network in 2025.
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BMW confirmed that through its partnership with SK tes, it plans to recover key battery minerals including cobalt, nickel and lithium, from its used EV batteries and feed them back into its battery materials supply chain. SK tes will process the black mass generated from the crushed and shredded waste batteries at its newly-built battery recycling plant in Rotterdam in the Netherlands.
The facility, which uses a hydrometallurgy chemical process to extract the minerals, has a processing capacity of 10,000 tons of black mass from batteries per year. BMW said the recovered minerals will be used in its new GEN 6 drivetrain.
BMW confirmed that the recycling partnership with SK tes will be expanded to include the US, Mexico and Canada in 2026.
BMW AG’s head of Circular Economy, Spare Parts Supply High Voltage Battery and Electric Powertrain, Jörg Lederbauer, said in a statement: “Partnerships like this increase our efficiency in terms of the circular economy. In the closed-loop process, all partners mutually benefit from their experiences.”
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