Mecaware's EIC Accelerator Route to Sulfate-Free Battery Recycling

By Mecaware's own count, most of the crushed battery waste Europe collects leaves the EU before it is turned back into metal. The CORDIS objective of Mecaware's EIC Accelerator project puts the share of pre-processed battery waste still exported from the EU at 80%. Mecaware, founded near Lyon in December 2020, proposes to refine that waste at home with a chemistry that, the company says, uses captured CO2 instead of acid and leaves no sulfate effluent behind.

The EIC Accelerator selected the project, ORBIS ("Optimised Recovery of Battery materials through Innovative Sulfate-free Solution"), at its October 2025 cut-off for blended finance. CORDIS records an EU contribution of €2,499,999 for June 2026 to May 2028. Mecaware announced on 17 February 2026 that the award combines a €2.5 million grant with access to equity of up to €10 million; the EIC's own company page says only that Mecaware "looks forward" to the EIC Fund as a capital partner, and no equity investment has been announced.

Carbon dioxide instead of sulfuric acid

Battery recycling usually ends in black mass, the dark powder left after cells are discharged, dismantled and shredded, which holds the lithium, nickel, cobalt and manganese. Mecaware's process starts there. Its October 2023 release says the chemistry comes from dynamic combinatorial chemistry developed by Professor Julien Leclaire at the ICBMS laboratory in Lyon (Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, INSA Lyon, CPE Lyon and CNRS), and that it exploits "the synergy between CO2 capture and critical metal recycling" in a closed loop. An AFP report of June 2024 describes CO2 captured from nearby factory fumes being used with amines to precipitate specific metals one by one.

The difference the company claims is in what is left over. Mecaware says its process needs no acid and no sulfates, and the ORBIS objective says it "produces no effluent", which is what would allow compact units placed next to the waste rather than one large central refinery. The objective sets this against conventional processes, which it says generate large volumes of polluting by-products, and claims 35% lower operating costs and 36% lower CO2 emissions without naming the reference plant. These are the company's figures; no independent comparison has been published.

The patent count varies by source. The 2023 release calls the process "quadruply patented" in one paragraph and refers to three patents, two co-owned with Aix-Marseille Université, Centrale Marseille and ENSC Montpellier, in another. The CORDIS objective and the company website both give 10 patents in 2025 and 2026.

€40 million before the EIC

The EIC grant is a small part of the money behind the company. In October 2023 Mecaware announced €40 million from a pool of investors led by Crédit Mutuel Innovation, followed by the SPI2 fund that Bpifrance manages for the French state under France 2030, with its earlier investors and banks; eeNews Europe and The Next Web reported the same figure. Neither the release nor the reports split the €40 million into equity, state subsidies and loans. The release adds that France 2030 subsidies from ADEME had been granted earlier in 2023 to the ScrapCO2MET project with Verkor and MTB.

In December 2023, according to AFP, Mecaware and its partners were awarded €6 million from the EU's Just Transition Fund, managed in this case by the Hauts-de-France region, for the Béthune pilot. Mecaware's SEPAR8 pilot page confirms that the pilot is financed by the Just Transition Fund with the region's support. In an undated interview, the EIC Scaling Club reported that Mecaware was planning a €50 million round by the second quarter of 2026; no closing of that round has been announced on the company's news page or found in press searches on 4 November 2026.

The company register shows the cost of the development phase. The INPI financial data published through the French government's company ratios dataset record, for the 2024 financial year, no turnover and a net loss of €3,357,256. Mecaware files its accounts with a confidentiality declaration, so the balance sheet and staff costs are not public. BODACC shows the latest capital increase on 5 March 2026 and no insolvency proceedings in any of the 13 notices published since 2021.

Two sites, and a schedule that keeps moving

Mecaware's research base is in Vénissieux, where the 2023 release describes a 1,600 square metre technical centre. Its pilot there runs at the scale of a kilogram, according to a company article of 1 September 2026. The industrial work has moved to Béthune, where Mecaware took its first premises on 16 November 2023, per its release with INERIS, as coordinator of the SEPAR8 hub with MTB, CircuLi-ion, two laboratories, two engineering firms and INERIS. AFP identifies the site as the former Bridgestone tyre factory.

The company's releases and AFP agree on the size of the first plant, about 7,500 to 8,000 tonnes of metal a year with about 100 jobs. They disagree on when. The October 2023 release said the first plant would open at the end of 2026. AFP reported in June 2024 that a 7,500-tonne line was planned in Béthune by 2028, with a second line beside Verkor's Dunkirk gigafactory under study. The company website now gives 2029 for Béthune, and the ORBIS objective gives 2030 for the first full-scale plant, followed by three more by 2034.

The pilot has slipped in the same way. The 2023 release put the ScrapCO2MET pilot, producing 50 tonnes of metal a year, in operation in 2025. Mecaware's ScrapCO2MET page gives March 2026 for commissioning the first pre-industrial hydrometallurgy unit in Béthune, the ORBIS objective says pilot operations in 2026, and the EIC company page lists a pilot unit launch in 2027. In September 2026 the company described the Béthune demonstrator as "designed to operate at the tonne scale" without saying it had started. No public source reviewed on 4 November 2026 confirms that it has.

Verkor's scrap, and unnamed buyers

The clearest commercial link is Verkor. The ORBIS objective states a battery scrap supply agreement with the gigafactory, the ScrapCO2MET project was set up to recycle Verkor's production scrap in a closed loop, and a Verkor spokesperson told AFP in 2024 that the two companies work together. Verkor opened its 16 GWh cell factory near Dunkirk in December 2025.

On the sales side, CORDIS cites ten pre-commercial off-take agreements, and Mecaware's COO told the EIC Scaling Club the company has off-takers in Europe, Korea and the United States. None is named. The one named partner for recycled metal is Lifth-One, the lithium refining project of Portugal's Lifthium Energy, with which Mecaware signed an agreement in principle in June 2025. It also launched a sodium-ion recycling project, NaCRe, with Tiamat, in October 2025.

What ORBIS promises, and what can be checked

ORBIS started in June 2026 and runs until May 2028, so CORDIS has no reports yet. The objective describes an "Integrated Hub" that combines battery waste preparation, second-life batteries and metal recycling on one site, with technology at TRL 6 in 2025. Its commercial targets: 11% of Europe's recycled metals market by 2031, €65 million of revenue for the first hub, and break-even by 2030.

1. Sulfate-free extraction at TRL 6Kilogram scaleThe company says its Vénissieux pilot beats some EU 2027 recovery targets; no rates or purity data are published.
2. Pilot operations in 2026Not confirmedBéthune demonstrator described as designed for tonne scale; no start of operations announced.
3. Battery waste preparation on siteOperatingDischarge and dismantling in Béthune, per the company, November 2026.
4. Feedstock from VerkorAgreementSupply agreement per CORDIS; cooperation confirmed by Verkor to AFP.
5. Ten off-take agreementsUnnamedOnly the Lifth-One agreement in principle is public.
6. EIC Fund equity of up to €10MNot announcedThe EIC page says Mecaware "looks forward" to it.

Why the EU wants this to work

The EU's Batteries Regulation requires recyclers to recover at least 50% of the lithium and 90% of the cobalt, nickel and copper in battery waste by the end of 2027, rising to 80% and 95% by the end of 2031, and from 2031 new EV batteries must contain minimum shares of recycled cobalt, lithium and nickel. The Critical Raw Materials Act, as AFP summarised it, aims for 25% of the EU's strategic raw materials to come from recycling. Both need refining capacity inside Europe, which is what the 80% export figure in the ORBIS objective says is missing. Mecaware's pilot targets match the 2031 rates for every metal it names.

The verdict

Mecaware has not been asked for comment for this article. The reporting is based on publicly available sources, listed below.