Euro-Dieuze Industrie was created in the 1990s. The site, which was managed by an independent, specialized in recycling alkaline and saline batteries.
A growing company
In the 2000s, Veolia took over this company and developed new concepts, new technologies but also new sectors to be able to process lithium-ion batteries for mobile phones as well as now batteries for electric vehicles.
Last year, despite the health crisis, work is booming, as Pascal Muller, president of the plant and regional director of the hazardous waste recycling activity at Veolia, tells us.
The real topic was the growth of lithium-ion business, especially the electric vehicle and the laptop. Last year, at this site, a little more than 6,000 tonnes of cells and batteries combined, and around 2,000 tonnes of lithium-ion cells and batteries, 1,000 tonnes of which came from electric vehicles. .
Banking on the future of electric vehicle batteries
Euro-Dieuze Industrie will be able to develop thanks to the batteries of electric vehicles. For 10 years, the Veolia group has been working on its recycling since it has been as many years since they were put on the market. Their lifespan is about ten years. Today, good news, a consortium between Veolia, Solvay and Renault has been found to set up a circular ecosystem of metals from electric batteries in Europe.
It is the culmination of work that we have been carrying out for a very long time. On the one hand with Renault, which is a long-standing customer of this site with whom we have worked in close collaboration for many years now, and then, on the other hand with Solvay, with which for almost 2 years now, we have built a model allowing to start with the by-products resulting from the treatment of the batteries of electric vehicles towards the precursor chemistry.
This site, in Saulnois, which is almost unique in France, was chosen to develop a pilot installation for the pre-industrial sector.
It is because this site, here, is developing to carry out the first stages of treatment with all the dismantling, safety and crushing operations, to produce this famous black-mass which contains the strategic metals: cobalt, nickel, lithium. These blacks-masse will be sent to a site of the Veolia group north of Metz where we will do all the chemical operation to extract these different metals, and then, these metals, which have a relative purity, it is there. that indeed the Solvay group comes into play to refine these materials and remake chemical precursors to remanufacture new batteries.
Growth will be significant for Euro-Dieuze Industrie. The site is expected to expand and hire, but no information has yet been released. The ultimate goal is to have a significant market share in Europe. Currently, we just know that Veolia is looking to increase the acceptance capacity of products on this site.
For Jean Rottner, president of the Grand-Est region, this is a great opportunity for the territory and it is, for him, a new step towards ecology.
You may be more inclined to buy an electric car, not to ask yourself whether there is still a need to extract rare metals from the other side of the planet, because it will have been. treated near you, in a short circuit, in an intelligent way, with national industrialists who had the intelligence to join forces to find and extract current batteries of cobalt, nickel, lithium … C ‘ is an intelligence, I believe, that must be defended. It is the creation of values, the creation of jobs.
Pending this development, Euro-Dieuze Industrie continues to invest.
The latest innovation brought here is the unit for the separation of different metals by mechanized means from shredded electric vehicle batteries. It is an investment of several hundred thousand euros which makes it possible to further improve the quality of the materials and to obtain the first recoverable metal co-products.
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