News
RHINOCEROS attends BID 2025
15/01/2026
Part of a joint dissemination initiative, RHINOCEROS, along with other members of the Cluster Hub “Materials for Batteries“, took the stage at Battery Innovation Days 2025, contributing to the discussion about the strategic role of recycling in the EU Battery Regulation and the broader circular economy.
Presentations explained, one after the other, Europe’s alternatives to build a circular battery ecosystem. With electric mobility accelerating and battery demand soaring, recycling is no longer optional. It has become a strategic necessity for Europe’s competitiveness and climate goals. And the EU wasted no time to announce on 3 December its recent ReSourceEU Action Plan, under the headline “Accelerating our critical raw materials strategy to adapt to a new reality”. ReSourceEU places circularity at the core of EU’s approach to set the basis for competitive CRMs industry in Europe. Projects similar to RHINOCEROS welcome this initiative and are willing to contribute with expertise and knowledge sourced from R&I.
Take-aways from the BID 2025 sessions
Eleonora Cali (RINA), representing the Materials for Batteries Cluster Hub in the parallel session “End of life, start of supply: Advancing battery recycling in Europe” on 2 December, joined leading experts to address two pressing realities in the battery industry:
- Europe’s dependency on imported raw materials. Lithium, cobalt, nickel, manganese and graphite are critical for the energy transition, yet supply chains remain dominated by non-European players. Recycling offers a way to keep these resources in Europe, reduce environmental impact, and comply with EU regulations on secondary raw material content. The European Commission’s new Battery Regulation aims to change that by mandating minimum recycled content for key materials from 2031. This is more than an environmental measure: it is an industrial policy designed to keep resources within Europe and reduce strategic dependency.
- the expected surge of end-of-life batteries. With EU speeding up its transition to electric mobility, the question of what happens to millions of batteries at the end of their lifetime is shifting from technical to strategic priority.
Surprisingly, speakers underlined EU’s anticipated timeline to develop recycling plants, with a scarce input of end of life applications. According to Andreas Opelt (Saubermacher) and Verena Fuchs (Cylib), for electric vehicle batteries, the timeline for returns is uncertain; early fleets are lasting longer than expected, delaying the recycling ramp-up. Opelt concluded his presentation with a pragmatic message: “The storm of batteries is coming, but if you build capacity too early, plants will sit empty”, arguing timing is critical.
Speakers from both R&I and industry taking the stage in this session called for:
- accelerated permitting for recycling infrastructures. In China, you can build a recycling plant in six months. In Europe, six months is not even enough to submit a permit,” Opel warned.
- enforcement of design-for-recycling standards in new battery regulations.
- support for industrial scale-up through funding but also simplified regulation.
- call to impose all possible measures to prevent black mass from exiting Europe, already reinforced by its recent classification as hazardous waste.
Probably one of the messages we take with us and integrate it to our initiatives’ objectives is that policies like the EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act, Battery Regulation and now recently adopted ReSourceEU provide the framework. What is needed now is execution at speed.
