RELiEF partners gather in Finland for raw minerals conference and annual meeting

Lappeenranta, Finland, 13.06.2024

“It has become clear that the role of raw materials will be crucial, not only today, but as well for the coming years and decades in order for the EU to assert its independence to foreign-extracted critical raw materials”.

These words opened the Xplorer 2024 conference under the topic of “Mining and Minerals amid Geopolitics and Energy Transition”.

The conference, organised by our consortium partner LUT was also an opportunity for the RELiEF partners to meet before their General Assembly and discuss these topics as well as to engage with new stakeholders in the project and to learn about new projects. Two partners of the consortium, Eurice and TechConcepts, took the opportunity to present their work in a poster, which was presented and discussed during a special session of the meeting. The aim of the poster was to present the Exploitation pathways for Lithium recycling from secondary sources. This initiative was very well received and allowed RELiEF to engage in new discussions with the audience and to get to know other projects with similar objectives .

The RELiEF 2024 General Assembly started afterwards in a productive and exciting atmosphere, not only because of the sunshine in Finland. Our partners Extracthive and Isatis partners presented the results of Work Package 2 “Material sourcing and Definition of use cases” which ends in June 2024; their work highlighted the findings on the lithium available for recycling in places other than the end-of-life automotive battery markets and how the RELiEF process is being developed for this. This was shortly followed by a joint workshop and round table on “Effective Leaching and Recovery of Lithium”. The partners involved – LUT, NOVA – provided through the panel discussion an overview of the actual drivers and barriers of the pathways developed in Work Package 4 (“Effective Leaching”) and Work Package 5 (“Selective Recovery and Purification of Lithium”), which are closely linked. This workshop gave the floor to the next steps in lithium recovery, namely the Battery Material Close Loop & Material Validation and Process Demonstration. The Partners IMNR and ZSW, who are working closely together on the two corresponding work packages 6 and 7, not only provided updates on the work done, but also on the recycling process investigated by ZSW regarding the Li source and the upcoming delivery of recycled Li agent.

As already mentioned, the world of EU-funded projects in the frame of CRM is a small but strongly engaged community dedicated at finding new ways of recycling CRM, producing better batteries and providing a better environment for the generations to come. Two similar funded initiatives, the LITHOS and RESPECT projects were presented by their partners as they already work together with RELiEF within the same Cluster “Production of raw materials for batteries from European resources”. This gave the RELiEF consortium a glimpse of how other projects are involved with the recycling processes and what goals they aim to achieve.

After a typical Finnish dinner , the second day of the General Assembly was dedicated to an Exploitation Workshop led by TechConcepts. The exploitation strategy was further refined with the involvement of the beneficiaries and will help to develop it from a societal, scientific and regulatory perspective in collaboration with LUT from a commercial perspective. This opened the floor for the final workshop led by LUT, with a workshop on Sustainability Assessment and Business Modelling & Production Specification for the business model. The consortium was invited to discuss the potential economic outcomes of the RELiEF results and therefore to consider new KERs (Key Exploitable Results) for this business model. The RELiEF General Assembly concluded with a tour of the LUT laboratories and dedicated interviews on the scientific and commercial aspects of the project. It allowed to set important milestones for the last year of the project, which will end in July 2025.

Here's to another productive year of recycling lithium from secondary sources!