On 9 July 2026, more than 50 representatives from academia, research organisations, public bodies, and battery industry leaders gathered online for the latest BATT-BRIDGE webinar. Titled “Sustainability in Focus: Batt-Bridge Projects – Assessing Recycling Processes for a Circular Battery Value Chain”, the session was organised by the RENOVATE project, moderated by LOMARTOV, and brought together experts from six sister Horizon Europe research initiatives: CIRCUBATT, HighMag, Revitalise, ReUse, RENOVATE, and STREAMS.
The BATT-BRIDGE initiative serves as a European Coordination and Support Action (CSA) building on the foundations of BATTERY 2030+ and Batteries Europe. Its mission is to strengthen Europe’s battery research and innovation ecosystem by fostering cross-project collaboration, industry alignment, and knowledge exchange.
Representing STREAMS, our partner Daniel Dias from Imperial College London joined Session 2 to explain how comprehensive sustainability frameworks, eco-design, and strategic raw material recovery are helping build an independent and resilient battery value chain in Europe.
Reducing Europe’s raw material dependencies
Europe currently relies heavily on imports for vital battery raw materials, such as lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese, graphite, and silicon. This dependence exposes European industries to global supply chain disruptions and volatile markets.
STREAMS directly targets this challenge by engineering flexible, scalable, and low-emission technologies to produce high-purity battery precursors and active materials. By processing primary minerals (like spodumene and natural graphite) alongside underutilised secondary waste streams (including mining tailings, bauxite residues, photovoltaic scrap, biochar, and spent battery black mass), STREAMS aims to:
- Diversify material supply: Recover battery-grade metals and minerals with high recovery rates.
- Innovate processing: Deploy sustainable technologies such as eco-friendly hydrometallurgy, deep eutectic solvents, and direct material reconditioning.
- Validate full-scale production: Demonstrate recovered materials inside prototype 10 Ah pouch cells manufactured using water-based electrode processing.
Spotlight on Daniel Dias: Safe and Sustainable by Design
During the webinar’s second session, dedicated to validating sustainability claims as novel technologies scale from research labs to industrial manufacturing, Daniel Dias shared insights from the sustainability and risk assessment research carried out at Imperial College London within STREAMS.
Daniel emphasised that true sustainability extends far beyond measuring carbon footprints alone:
- Holistic environmental & social assessment: Evaluating energy usage, water consumption, resource efficiency, toxicity, and social impacts across global supply chains.
- Safe and Sustainable by Design (SSbD): Embedding safety and eco-design principles into material processing from the earliest developmental stages through to final battery cell production and recycling.
- Techno-economic feasibility: Assessing industrial CapEx/OpEx modeling to ensure recovered materials remain cost-competitive with market benchmarks.
- Aligned circularity metrics: Harmonising environmental, social, and economic indicators with new European Battery Regulations and ISO standards.
A shared european vision for battery circularity
The webinar showcased how Horizon Europe projects are combining forces across the value chain:
- CIRCUBATT: Highlighted how sustainability assessments link directly with business model innovation, battery longevity, and supply chain resilience.
- RENOVATE: Showcased methods for embedding sustainability from early development to recover over 95% of end-of-life battery cell components.
- REVITALISE: Addressed the complex challenges of evaluating multi-chemistry recycling routes (NMC, LFP, and sodium-ion batteries).
- ReUse: Presented advancements in direct recycling technologies specifically tailored for LFP batteries.
- STREAMS & HighMag: Demonstrated how eco-design, critical raw material recovery, and techno-economic modeling support Europe’s strategic battery autonomy.