In brief: Altilium, a UK cleantech company, has secured £18.5 million in grants from the government’s DRIVE35 Expansion Fund to build ACT3, the country’s first commercial refinery to recover critical minerals from end-of-life electric vehicle batteries. Located in Plymouth, Devon, the facility will process 24,000 electric vehicle batteries a year using Altilium’s patented EcoCathode™ process, producing battery-grade materials with up to 74% lower carbon emissions than their mined equivalents and supporting 70 new jobs. A second, separate DRIVE35 grant funds a parallel research project with luxury car manufacturer JLR and Warwick Manufacturing Group to produce, for the first time in the UK, battery cells for electric vehicles containing recycled cathode and anode materials.
The background and what it unlocks
The £18.5 million comes from the DRIVE35 Scale-Up Fund, a program implemented by the Department of Business and Commerce in partnership with the Advanced Propulsion Center UK and Innovate UK. DRIVE35 is part of the UK Government’s wider £2.5bn commitment to accelerate the domestic electric vehicle supply chain and battery manufacturing capacity. At a time when Private investment in European climate technology fell to its lowest level in five years in early 2025.Government-backed industrial subsidies have become an increasingly important source of capital for companies building the physical infrastructure required by the energy transition.
Altilium, which had previously raised more than £17 million in private investment from strategic partners including Marubeni Corporation and Mizuho Bank, described the announcement as a pivotal moment. “This funding marks a pivotal moment for Altilium and the UK battery ecosystem.“said Dr. Christian Marston, COO and co-founder. “By scaling up our recycling technology and building the first commercial facility of its kind in the UK, we are closing the loop on battery materials and improving the growth, productivity and competitiveness of the UK automotive supply chain..” The grant is also expected to unlock additional private investment from new and existing shareholders.
What the ACT3 plant will produce
ACT3 will be built in Plymouth, Devon, where Altilium already operates the UK’s only hydrometallurgical pilot plant for recycling electric vehicle batteries. The facility building is now complete; Equipment installation is scheduled to begin in summer 2026, with commissioning planned for late 2027. Once operational, ACT3 will process 24,000 end-of-life EV batteries per year using Altilium’s EcoCathode™ hydrometallurgical process, which recovers more than 95% of metals from cathodes and more than 99% of graphite from battery waste. The results are the critical intermediate materials used in battery cell manufacturing: nickel mixed hydroxide precipitate, lithium sulfate and graphite, all essential inputs for the production of next-generation cathodes and anodes. According to an independent life cycle assessment, these recycled materials generate up to 74% fewer carbon emissions than their mined equivalents.
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The plant will create 70 new jobs at the Plymouth plant. Altilium is not the only one pushing this model towards commercial scale: Tozero opened Europe’s first industrial battery recycling plant in Germany in March 2026a sign that the continent’s resilience is increasing alongside the volume of batteries reaching the end of their useful lives.
Why the supply chain case has become urgent
The strategic logic behind ACT3 is simple. Indonesia is the world’s leading supplier of nickel mixed hydroxide precipitate, while China processes most of the world’s lithium and graphite for battery production. British carmakers building electric vehicle supply chains are exposed to compound risk: geopolitical disruptions, price volatility and the export controls that China introduced on graphite at the end of 2024 and extended to a range of lithium battery inputs until 2025. The trade tariffs compounded existing concerns about hardware and materials supply chain security across European industry. in 2025, strengthening the political and commercial arguments for domestic alternatives. Altilium’s recycling facilities offer a way out of that dependency. European battery companies can differentiate themselves from Asian manufacturers in terms of sustainability, recyclability and regulatory compliance. rather than on unit cost, and the provenance and carbon credentials of British battery recycled materials are precisely the type of value proposition that allows them to do so. The recycled materials Altilium produces carry verified life cycle assessment data showing a 74% emissions reduction, a figure that becomes increasingly material as automotive customers face their own pressure to decarbonize supply chains.
The roadmap and partnerships
ACT3 is designed as the first step of a two-stage national build. Altilium’s planned ACT4 facility in Teesside, northeast England, is sized to process 150,000 end-of-life electric vehicle batteries per year and produce 30,000 tonnes of cathode active materials annually, enough on current projections to meet around 20% of UK battery materials demand by 2030. Together, the Plymouth and Teesside facilities would represent the domestic battery materials recovery infrastructure. most important thing the UK has ever tried to build.
The second DRIVE35 grant, announced simultaneously, funds a collaborative R&D project with JLR and Warwick Manufacturing Group. Building on a previous Advanced Propulsion Center program that demonstrated the UK’s first battery cells produced from recycled cathode active materials, the new project extends the work to include recycled graphite on the anode side. “With the inclusion of recycled graphite in this new project, the UK will now have a viable route to producing cathode and anode materials domestically.” Marston said, calling him “an essential step for automakers seeking supply chain resilience and sustainable battery materials.“
Altilium’s investor base was built with an eye on the Japanese automotive market: Marubeni Corporation took a strategic position in January 2025, and Mizuho Bank followed in March 2025, providing access to supply chain networks and market intelligence in the region that will be important as Altilium grows. 2025 established AI as the defining technology of the decadeBut the supply chain of recycled critical minerals that underpins the energy transition will prove as fundamental to the technological story of the decade as the models that execute it.
