Our Twin-Track Strategy: Alkaline vs Acid—A Necessary Race to the Top
Track 1: The Alkaline Route with Mint Innovation through Project COMET
Mint Innovation’s alkaline-solution process offers:
• Lower environmental impact through milder chemistry
• Favourable safety and operating conditions
• Strong potential for high-purity metal outputs
• A modular and scalable processing design
Alkaline separation holds significant promise for producing clean, circular critical metals. But like any emerging technology, it still needs to prove the most competitive at industrial-scale in terms of cost and throughput.
Track 2: The Acid Route with BatX
BatX, our prospective partner, brings a hydrometallurgical acid-based approach characterised by:
• Strong extraction efficiencies
• Mature and well-understood chemical engineering fundamentals
• High recovery rates across the full NMC chemistry range
• Compatibility with large-scale, high-volume operations
Acid separation is a proven and highly effective pathway, but it must demonstrate that its consumables, waste management, and overall processing costs can compete with next-generation alkaline systems
Why Run Both Tracks?
Because the market hasn’t picked a winner yet—and neither have we.
We are actively evaluating:
• The grade of the final metal outputs
• The purity levels achievable
• The operational costs and energy requirements
• The environmental footprint of each method
• The scalability of the systems
Our commitment is simple:
Whichever pathway delivers the highest-grade recycled metals at the lowest cost—ready to go straight back into new batteries, and with the lowest environmental impact—is the pathway we will champion at scale.
This twin-track strategy ensures that Recyclus stays ahead of the competitive curve rather than behind it. It is strategic optionality, engineered for a rapidly evolving sector.