The Munich startup’s demo plant at Chemical Park Gendorf in Bavaria processes 1,500 tonnes of battery waste annually, producing 100 tonnes of high-purity lithium carbonate at costs the company claims are significantly more competitive than conventional miners. A full-scale facility with a capacity of 45,000 tonnes per year is projected for 2030.
Europe faces a problem with unseen batteries. In driveways, garages, and junkyards across the continent, end-of-life electric vehicles contain lithium, graphite, and nickel-cobalt, which European manufacturers are eager to source globally. Until now, no company had a process to recover these materials at an industrial scale. Tozero, a Munich-based deeptech startup founded in 2022, claims they have a solution, and today they operationalized it.
The company launched its industrial demo plant at Chemical Park Gendorf in Bavaria, leveraging the site’s plug-and-play industrial infrastructure to commission the facility in around six months.
The plant can process over 1,500 tonnes of battery waste annually and produce more than 100 tonnes of high-purity lithium carbonate every year. Unlike traditional pyrometallurgical recycling processes that retrieve copper and aluminum while losing lithium and graphite, tozero’s proprietary acid-free hydrometallurgical process operates in a single cycle and produces materials pure enough to directly integrate into battery cell manufacturing without further refinement.
Significant commercial achievements are verified independently. In April 2024, nine months after opening its Munich pilot facility, tozero became the first company in Europe to supply recycled lithium to commercial customers. In February 2025, it became the first in Europe to qualify 100% recycled graphite for use in lithium-ion battery cell manufacturing at an industrial scale.
The demo plant combines both accomplishments on a larger scale and will serve as a model for a full-scale commercial facility aimed at processing 45,000 tonnes of battery waste annually, with a production target of around 8,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate and approximately 10,000 tonnes of graphite by 2030.
Tozero was founded in July 2022 by Sarah Fleischer, a serial entrepreneur and mechanical engineer, and Dr. Ksenija Milicevic Neumann, a metallurgy expert whose groundbreaking research at RWTH Aachen University forms the technical foundation of the company’s process.
The company has completed pilots with BMW, MAN, and other automotive OEMs, demonstrating a consistent lithium recovery rate exceeding 80%, meeting the EU’s mandatory target for 2031 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 — totaling approximately €17 million in funding.
The geopolitical context makes this significant. China dominates the global supply of graphite and lithium processing; Europe remains heavily import-dependent. The EU Critical Raw Materials Act mandates 25% of supply from recycling — a target companies like tozero are poised to meet. Global lithium demand is expected to quadruple by 2030, driven by EV growth and grid-scale energy storage, while EU graphite demand alone could rise up to 25 times by 2040.
The Gendorf plant is a small but meaningful initial industrial response to a supply problem Europe has yet to address seriously at scale.