The Munich startup’s demo plant at the Gendorf Chemical Park in Bavaria processes 1,500 tons of battery waste a year and produces 100 tons of high-purity lithium carbonate, making the company twice as competitive as conventional miners. A full-scale facility with an annual production capacity of 45,000 tons is planned for 2030.
There is a battery problem that Europe has not seen. Parked on highways, piled up in garages, and disintegrating in landfills across the continent, tens of thousands are end-of-life lithium, graphite, and nickel-cobalt electric vehicles that European manufacturers are eager to source.
Until now, no company had a process that could recover these materials on an industrial scale. zeroFounded in 2022, the Munich-based deep-tech startup says it has one, and it launched it today.
The company launched an industrial demonstration plant at the Gendorf Chemical Park in Bavaria, a site that provides plug-and-play industrial infrastructure allowing tozero to have the facility up and running in about 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 annually.
Unlike conventional pyrometallurgical recycling processes, which recover copper and aluminum while losing lithium and graphite, tozero’s proprietary acid-free hydrometallurgy process works in one cycle, producing materials pure enough to go directly back into battery cell production without further purification.
Commercial milestones are real and independently verified. In April 2024, nine months after opening the Munich pilot facility, tozero became the first company in Europe deliver recycled lithium to commercial customers.
In February 2025, it became the first company in Europe to match 100% recycled graphite for use in industrial-scale lithium-ion battery cell production.
The demonstration plant now brings both achievements together on a new scale and will serve as the blueprint for a full-scale commercial facility planned for 2030, with production of approximately 8,000 tons of lithium carbonate and approximately 10,000 tons of graphite, targeting 45,000 tons of battery waste per year.
tozero Sarah Fleischer, a serial entrepreneur and mechanical engineer who launched an early-stage VC and startup incubator at the Luxembourg Space Agency in July 2022, and Dr. Dr. Founded by Ksenija Milicevic Neumann. company process.
The company has completed pilots with BMW, MAN and other automotive OEMs and demonstrated a stable lithium recovery rate of more than 80%, which already meets the mandatory target for 2031 under the EU’s 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, and a €2.5 million EIC Accelerator grant. The total funding is approximately 17 million euros.
The geopolitical context makes time important. China controls the vast majority of the world’s graphite supply and processes most of the global lithium; Europe remains almost entirely dependent on imports for both.
The EU’s Critical Materials Act requires 25% of the supply to come from recycling. battery recyclers is built as tozero to meet. Global lithium demand is forecast to quadruple by 2030 with EV growth and grid-scale energy storage, while graphite demand in the EU alone could increase 25-fold by 2040.
The Gendorf plant is a small but meaningful first industrial response to a supply problem that Europe has yet to seriously address at scale.
