The Munich startup’s demonstration plant at the Chemical Park Gendorf in Bavaria processes 1,500 tons of battery waste a year and produces 100 tons of high-purity lithium carbonate, at costs the company says are twice as competitive as those of conventional miners. A large-scale facility with a capacity of 45,000 tons per year is planned for 2030.
Europe has a battery problem it can’t see. Parked on driveways, stacked in garages, breaking down in scrapyards across the continent, there are tens of thousands of end-of-life electric vehicles containing the same lithium, graphite and nickel-cobalt that European manufacturers are struggling to source abroad.
Until now, no company had a process capable of recovering these materials on an industrial scale. toceroa Munich-based deep tech startup founded in 2022, says it has one and turned it on today.
The company has launched its industrial demonstration plant at the Chemical Park Gendorf in Bavaria, a site that provides the plug-and-play industrial infrastructure that allowed tozero to commission the facility in approximately six months.
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The plant can process more than 1,500 tons of battery waste per year and produce more than 100 tons of high-purity lithium carbonate per year.
Unlike conventional pyrometallurgical recycling processes that recover copper and aluminum while losing lithium and graphite, tozero’s patented acid-free hydrometallurgical process runs in a single cycle and produces materials pure enough to be reintroduced directly into battery cell manufacturing without further refinement.
Business milestones are real and independently verified. In April 2024, nine months after opening its pilot facility in Munich, tozero became the first company in Europe to deliver recycled lithium to commercial customers.
In February 2025, it became the first in Europe to qualify 100% recycled graphite for use in the production of industrial-scale lithium-ion battery cells.
The demonstration plant now brings together both achievements in a new order of magnitude and will serve as a model for a large-scale commercial facility that will target 45,000 tons of battery waste per year, with production of around 8,000 tons of lithium carbonate and approximately 10,000 tons of graphite, planned for 2030.
tozero was founded in July 2022 by Sarah Fleischer, a serial entrepreneur and mechanical engineer who had previously launched an early-stage startup and venture capital incubator at the Luxembourg Space Agency, and Dr. Ksenija Milicevic Neumann, a metallurgy expert whose groundbreaking research at RWTH Aachen University, published in Nature, forms the technical basis of the company’s process.
The company has completed pilot tests with BMW, MAN and other automotive OEMs demonstrating a stable lithium recovery rate of over 80%, a figure that already meets the EU’s mandatory 2031 target under the Battery Directive.
Its investor base includes NordicNinja, Atlantic Labs, Honda, JGC Group through Mirai Corporate Venture Capital, Verve Ventures, Possible Ventures and In-Q-Tel, the strategic investment arm of the US intelligence community, along with a €2.5 million EIC Accelerator grant. The total financing is approximately 17 million euros.
The geopolitical context makes the moment significant. China controls the vast majority of the world’s graphite supply and processes the overwhelming share of the world’s lithium; In both cases, Europe remains almost completely dependent on imports.
The EU Critical Raw Materials Law requires 25% of supply to come from recycling, a target that battery recyclers like tozero they are being built to comply. Global demand for lithium is projected to quadruple by 2030, driven by the growth of electric vehicles and grid-scale energy storage, while demand for graphite in the EU alone could increase by up to 25 times by 2040.
The Gendorf plant is a small but significant first industrial response to a supply problem that Europe has yet to seriously address at scale.
