Northvolt's Revolt Ett: Building the World's Largest Battery-Recycling Facility in Northern Sweden to Solve the E-Waste Problem

 In Skellefteå, a city in northern Sweden, a team of 250 construction workers braves the cold every morning to build what is expected to be the largest battery-recycling facility in the world. This facility, called Revolt Ett, belongs to Northvolt, a battery-manufacturing startup founded in 2016 by Peter Carlsson, a former Tesla vice president. Backed by investors such as Goldman Sachs, Baillie Gifford, VC Norrsken, and Spotify's cofounder Daniel Ek, Northvolt is valued at $12 billion and supplies batteries to automotive giants like BMW, Volkswagen, and Volvo from its nearby gigafactory.

The demand for lithium batteries has surged with the increasing popularity of electric vehicles (EVs), which accounted for 12.1% of the total market share for new cars in Europe in 2022, a record-breaking year. However, the start and end of life of batteries pose a significant environmental challenge. Rare earth materials used in batteries need to be mined, often causing ecological and social damage in developing areas. These materials are then shipped around the world, with battery manufacturing largely concentrated in China. Additionally, batteries are traditionally difficult to recycle, often ending up in landfills and contaminating the environment with chemicals.

Northvolt aims to tackle these challenges with its Revolt Ett recycling facility. The company believes that recycling old batteries locally and using recovered rare earth materials as feedstock for new batteries is the solution to the sustainability and supply-chain woes of the market. The recycling process, developed by Northvolt in 2018 and tested in subsequent years, involves crushing, shredding, and filtering dismantled batteries. Different materials such as copper, aluminum, and plastic are separated and sent to industry partners for recycling, while Northvolt is left with a black powder called black mass, which contains valuable metals such as nickel, manganese, cobalt, and lithium.

Northvolt uses a process called hydrometallurgy to extract these metals from the black mass, returning them to battery-grade quality. This process involves dissolving the black mass in acid, which returns the metals to their elementary form and removes impurities that may have been present, making the recycling process highly efficient. The company aims to recycle 125,000 tons of battery materials per year once Revolt Ett is fully operational, which is a significant step towards addressing the growing e-waste problem. For context, it is estimated that over 1.2 million tons of batteries will reach their end of life in 2025, according to S&P Global's IHS Markit.

Northvolt's goal is to use 50% recycled metals in its batteries by 2030, a target that the company's chief environmental officer, Emma Nehrenheim, describes as "somewhere between realistic and challenging." She believes that an industry-wide approach is needed to "close all loops" and make battery manufacturing circular, and that recycling will play a crucial role in achieving this. Nehrenheim predicts that beyond 2040, most of the raw materials used in Northvolt's batteries will come from recycling, further reducing the environmental impact of battery production.

Revolt Ett is not the only recycling facility operated by Northvolt. The company also has a joint partnership with the energy and aluminum company Hydro, which runs the Hydrovolt pilot recycling process up to the black-mass stage. Northvolt takes the black mass, while Hydro recycles the aluminum. This partnership allows for a more efficient and sustainable recycling process, as recycling aluminum requires only about 5% of the energy needed for virgin aluminum, reducing the environmental footprint and global