Breaking down battery recycling with William Bergh (CEO @Cling Systems)

We are in this I'm gonna go as far as calling it a battery movement. And there's lithium ion cells being produced at massive scale in all sorts of devices. And so the elephant in the room is, what happens to all these battery cells when they reach end of life? And what's the most appropriate and responsible way of moving them onto their next pasture?

The cool thing with batteries is not only that they can power electric mobility and renewable energy. It's the fact that they hold the potential of being used now and in ten years, in fifty years, in a hundred years, and in in a very distant future. The market is growing incredibly fast. And in terms of, you know, capacity for recycling, there's a massive overcapacity.

There's so many recyclers out there that it's not a demand problem, it's a supply problem.

More and more battery storage is being created every single day, and with so much need for the raw materials, recycling batteries seems to be an obvious way to improve sustainability around the supply chain. However, the market for battery recycling is still a mature, and there are lots of challenges to overcome in order to make recycling a success at scale. William Berg, CEO and founder at Cling Systems, a circular platform enabling the procurement and logistics for end of life batteries, joins Quentin in today's episode to discuss recycling and second life applications for battery storage.

If you're enjoying the podcast, please hit subscribe so you never miss an episode, and give us a rating wherever you listen. Let's jump in.

Hello, Will. Welcome to the podcast.

Hi, Q. Thank you very much.

Today, we're gonna talk about one of the big elephants in the room, and I'm so glad that you're coming on to talk about it. We are in this this battery industry. I'm gonna go as far as calling it a battery movement, and there's lithium ion cells being produced at massive scale and all sorts of devices, grid scale, all all sorts of things happening with batteries. And so the elephant in the room is what happens to all these battery cells when they reach end of life?

And what's the most appropriate and responsible way of moving them onto their next pasture? And this is one of those things that just comes up over and over again, and it feels like it's it's like the first thing that the naysayers go to. Right? Which is, you know, batteries are bad for the environment because, you know, put them all into landfill and and whatever.

And, so, actually, I'm sort of leading this conversation a bit. I'm I'm not, but I've got a feeling that what you guys do do at Cling is solving that problem, and I'm delighted that today we're gonna talk about that problem. So, Will, welcome to the podcast. Do you just wanna talk to our audience about what Cling is and what you do there?

One of the most fascinating things with batteries is the fact that they can be recycled and they can be repurposed. They can actually be they're they're made out of metals. They can have an indefinite life, at least their materials inside. So the the cool thing with batteries is not only that they can power electric mobility and renewable energy.

It's the fact that they hold the potential of being used now and in ten years, in fifty years, in a hundred years, and in in a very distant future. Killeen is, you know, built and designed to make that transition to circularity faster. Our mission is to accelerate the transition to circular battery value chains. And we are founded on the back of my master thesis on, you know, mapping out end of life flows of batteries in Europe, saying how can how can battery recycling companies and battery repurposing companies access enough supply getting the batteries there to to scale.

So, yeah, we're here to make batteries become circular faster. So it's not a question of if or or so. It's it's when.

And what does all that what what does this what does this charged term, circular? What does what does circular mean? Because my it really gets abused.

It does.

It it's it's a it's a it's a big question. What what is what is circularity? I still start I still struggle with that term. What is what is recycling? But what to me, what the most important thing is just how can we use the materials we have in the most in the best way. We have a finite set of resources on our planet, and it's everything about using that material as effectively and efficiently as possible. And whether that is prolonging the life of a product or it's even ending that life short so you can reuse that material in a subsequent life or a second life or re recycling that material to produce new batteries, it's it's just a matter of how do we best use that resource.

So looking at on the different ways of batteries where they can go at end of life. First of all, batteries can be reused in the same application.

You can just you can just prolong the life of whatever you have, but it can also be repurposed. So you can take an a battery from an electric vehicle, which is not fit for that purpose anymore. Maybe you don't accelerate fast enough or you don't reach as far as you as you wish.

You can take the battery and you can put it in a stationary storage and put that towards the electric grid or towards a a solar farm or wind farm or or something like that.

And eventually, when the battery is not fit for any purpose, you can you can recycle the battery, which means taking out the materials of lithium and cobalt and manganese and and all those critical rare earth materials.

And you can put them back in producing new batteries, which is quite fascinating. And that's that's what I mean with, the batteries can be used for, an indefinite time.

So that's the that's the nirvana, right, which is, you know, you're you're producing all of these battery cells, and you get the they they get used to all these different applications depending on what their characteristics are moved around the economy, really. And then at the end, you recycle all of it and then create new batteries with them. But the reality is quite different to that at the moment, isn't it? And that's what you guys are looking to solve at Cling.

Can you just give us an overview about your business, Cling, that you founded? How old is it? What do you guys do? What's the problem you solve?

And who's the customer?

We were founded in twenty twenty. And the problem we're trying to solve is the fact that batteries are very hard to transact. They're hard to buy. They're hard to sell. They're hard to move. So we're developing the solutions to to make that more frictionless.

We're helping sellers of batteries to sell, and we're helping buyers of batteries to buy and facilitate all of the kind of value added services in between. So imagine a car manufacturers or a battery producer who just have batteries to sell. Reaching a demand market is is quite difficult, actually. You might imagine that battery producers are good at selling batteries, but the entire battery industry is built on offtake agreements with car manufacturers.

So when the EV market is not growing as fast as it it was expected, there's currently a massive oversupply of batteries, meaning there's just batteries all over the place on on shelves and in warehouses.

And the battery companies are not designed to sell those batteries because they were designed to sell to one very, very large buyer, which would be a, let's say, a German car manufacturer.

So we're helping battery producers to sell into other kind of type of markets. And on the other side, it's about helping battery manufacturers in in terms of energy storage builders and battery recyclers to access that supply market. So if you're a battery manufacturer building energy storage systems, like, how do you find the right supply? How do you know which cells to to buy, which modules to buy? This is a very early market, and sourcing those batteries is is hard, especially when the sales teams at car manufacturers and battery producers just are not designed to sell those batteries.

Equally, as a battery recycler looking to recycle the batteries, like, where do you source your supply from? The batteries are everywhere and nowhere. And and it's such a fragment fragmented market. It's it's hard to to actually just procure supply. So we we come in in in the transaction phase of of batteries.

So you guys are are you're interacting with the big battery cell manufacturers, also the the big off takers and some small off takers. And then you that's that's the new kind of the the first life battery world. But then you're also supporting second life and recycling too. Is that right?

Yes. Yes. So on the secondhand market, it's companies who repurpose batteries, take EV batteries, and give them a secondary life in a stationary storage. So we move along the battery value chain. We speak with battery producers, car manufacturers, repurposing companies, and recyclers.

Whenever I hear about second life batteries, I just have this there's something that happens in my brain which thinks about second pressing with olive oil. I don't know anything about olive oil. I just know that first pressing is the expensive one, second pressing, I don't know. Someone else has had a bit of it. So anyway, back to back to batteries. So, Cling, you've been going about four years, about ten people in the company. And so who are the big customers today?

So the big customers today are building stationary storage systems. So they buy modules from car manufacturers mostly who then repurpose them into station stationary storage. It's still a very young market, so we still struggle to define, like, this is the key customer or this is the, you know, these are the big companies in the industry. So we we serve companies all the way from from, you know, Asian battery producers to European car manufacturers to recyclers and repurposing companies.

So we're now gonna talk about, especially recycling and circularity in the battery world. And the reason why this is so important is because we've actually never had anyone on this podcast talk through battery recycling in great detail. I know you know a lot about it. But before we get there, can you just give an explanation of what circular versus linear economies are?

Yeah. No. I think the easiest way to describe a circular ecosystem is where there's no factories. There's no one producing what you want.

What you do is you you have a scavenge for whatever is there, and then you have to make the best of it. I think that's the easiest way to understand the the difficulties with with a circular market is because there is there's no one producing what you want. You have to be the one adapting your business and your operations and your manufacturing to what is available rather than you setting the criteria saying, this is what we want to build. This is what what our customers want, and you can go to a factory saying, please build this.

So it puts the the adaptability on the buyer rather than on the seller, which makes a a quite weird, market dynamics compared to linear systems.

Alright. Let's get to the difficult subject.

How bad is it right now? So battery recycling and the environmental impact slash damage of of battery cells at end of life. I know you spent a lot of time thinking about this stuff. How bad is it right now?

It's not very bad at all. The market is growing incredibly fast. And in terms of, you know, capacity for recycling, there's a massive overcapacity.

There's so many recyclers out there that it's not a demand problem. It's a supply problem. There's not enough batteries to fill the recyclers.

No way.

Yeah. The the I mean, it's a very fast growing market, battery recycling, and there's recyclers all over the world. And such a it's a global market.

There there's recyclers in in the US, in India, in Asia, all around Europe that all compete for the same supply.

So I wouldn't say it's bad. I I I would say it's slow, and it's also depending on, like, whose perspective you have. If you're a European recycler, it's pretty bad. You have high cost of operations.

You are late to the game.

The well, that and there's no or very little public support or public funding. What you compete against is an American market where recyclers have been going for a couple of years, but they're also funded with the IRA.

So US recyclers can pay very well for scrap batteries. On the other hand, on the on the other side is that you have China and you have Korean recyclers and Japanese recyclers.

They have been recycling for ten years, fifteen years, twenty years. They're really, really good. And so what they they can also pay really well for scrap batteries.

Europeans lack public funding and lack experience.

Well, they lack public funding experience, also cheap enough energy because it's quite an energy intensive task. Right? And then, and then they lack subsidy. You know, through the Inflation Reduction Act, the US has got subsidy.

And through state subsidy, directly or indirectly in China, there's plenty of subsidy rolling around there. So Europe's got some catching up to do. Let's just jump down that rabbit hole for a second. So it's quite surprising that this or to take your words, that there's oversupply of recycling facilities for battery cells.

And so what kind of companies are are doing this?

So there is many companies, the battery recyclers, they most of them come from traditional scrap recycling companies. Europe, however, yeah, it's it's a it's a wide mic wide mix of of scrap recyclers and and new startups in in the world. There's there's hundreds of battery recyclers, and some are more have a have a more, known a name than others. In in the US, the most known is probably Redwood Materials, but there's five or six really well known companies in in Europe. If I wanna highlight some to support our fellow, you know, startups, there's a there's a German called Two Zero, who just today raised eleven million euros in their seed funding, which is fantastic.

So I'm very happy to see, you know, funding going into to European recycling that which is, very important.

So what does it take to recycle a battery? That's a bit of a that is a bit of a basic question, but let's break it down. So you wanna you you get some cells in as scrap, and you buy them from at the moment before your company came along. Right?

So you're I'm a recycler. I need to find some scrap batteries. Where do I find them? And then what do I do to process them?

And how effective is the recycling process of getting those rare earth metals out and the other materials that are of some socioeconomic value?

To access supply and and go and actually buy batteries, you would have to have a procurement department or a procurement person. This person is traveling around and meeting and shaking hands. That's that's mostly how you access supply.

Old school.

Yeah. It's an old school. I mean, it's this industry is built from scrap trading and scrap recycling. And, like, the the recycling industry is, you know, it's a it's as old as we've, you know, it's as trade almost.

We've just taken old stuff, and we've done new stuff with it. It's a it's a very, very old traditional industry with a lot of pride and a lot of best practice, but it's it comes from a personal relationship driven ways of doing business, which is fair enough. But for you as a recycler, you I mean, if you like traveling, that's that's fantastic. You would have to travel around you.

You meet a lot of people. You shake a lot of hands. But once you've had identified supply and you can make a good offer for that, and you've acquired it and you've transported it and you've had done all the paperwork for moving hazardous waste out of that country into yours, then and you have it in your facility.

Then there's two things you're doing. The first one is shredding the batteries and separating out something called the black mass. This is, you know, the cathode and the anode material, which is which is the good stuff. You separated out the the organics and and, like, low material value or value materials.

So just to be clear, when you say shredded, an actual shredder, a big thing with jaws that shreds things.

Oh, it's Yes.

Yeah. Okay. Alright. Now I'm gonna sniff.

Yes. Yeah. So you have, like, a big shredder. You can have many, like, what do you call them? Hammer hammer mills.

That's not those batteries.

It's a lot of noise. Like, when you when you walk through a battery recycle, you wanna wear head air protection. So it's a long line with a lot of shredding and milling and so on. And and by the end of that, you have a white bag full of black mass.

Either you put that again out on the market, you try and sell it further to other, recyclers, which is the most common thing to do.

Which hold on. This black mess this black mess there you go. This black mass is all is it is all the different materials all mixed in together, or have you already separated them out?

You've separated out some materials, but the the all the cobalt and the nickel and graphite and manganese and lithium is in inside there.

Okay. So it's like a lucky dip.

Yeah. I mean, the I mean, the black mass is a very highly traded commodity at the moment, and it's it's growing very fast. We see new European regulations trying to keep that within Europe, making it harder to export.

At the same time, China is opening up import of black mass, which has been a trouble or it's been a a challenge before because China has put up barriers for importing waste, which makes sense. They don't wanna be the dumping place of the world. But now they want to be they want to have black mass dumped on their market.

It sounds almost kind of magical. Right? This black mass moving around the place.

Yeah. It's it's it's beautiful. But if you don't do that or if you're if you send it forward, what what happens is that you put you put it in a hydrometallurgical process. And that's where you leach out the the materials from there that would actually then later go down go into battery production.

What does that mean? Leach leach out?

It's a good question. Any chemist would not like my way of saying this now, but what you do is that you have a lot of baths of with acids, and they're mixed in their white way to to first precipitate out, like, lift nickel. Nickel hydroxide is something you get out, and then you take out the manganese and then take out the cobalt and then take out the, the lithium.

Filthy business, this.

No. Yeah. And and I think that's very important to emphasize is that recycling is a dirty business.

So if I got this right, you you shred these battery cells. You get the black matter. You either flog down the international market, perhaps even to China. You take it and then turn it into more cells in a never ending production lines, or you then put it through some sort of separation process in baths, salty baths or acid baths by the sounds of things. And then you get all these materials out, and then there's a there's a there's a liquid market to come and buy those pure materials then.

Yeah. So those materials are then going back to commodity trading, or they're probably pre pre bought by battery producers. Much of what is driving this market is regulations again, back to regulations. In thirty one February, Anyone who puts a battery on the European market needs to have a certain amount of recycled content in those batteries, which might sound like a good thing.

Yeah. How how much out of interest? What sort of percentage are we talking here?

Top of my mind, sixteen percent cobalt.

And sixteen percent of the cobalt has been it is recycled from the be, like yeah.

It should be from recycled sources.

That's not very high, is it? I thought it'd be much higher than that.

There's probably not enough supply to make that happen.

And so what's currently happening is that anyone who wants to put batteries on the market in twenty thirty one, some of them are already stockpiling batteries, holding them from recycling to recycle them in twenty thirty one so that they can get the material done No. Put in production.

Is this for real? This sounds like a conspiracy theory. Is this real?

It's real. So that's one, like, unfortunate consequence of putting future recycling quotas into battery production or or batteries put on the on the market.

There there's another consequence as well, which is it has proven or it has demonstrated that there is a big market up ahead.

And whoever is surviving or living in twenty thirty has a really good business because there's gonna be a premium on recycled content or recycled material that goes into batteries.

What has happened, unfortunately, is that it has probably pushed the battery market to grow recycling market to grow too fast, too early.

So what I mentioned there is earlier about there's more battery recycling capacity than there is batteries on the market.

So you pay more for recycled materials than you do for the to come back to the olive oil adage.

Your second pressing is actually more expensive than your first pressing.

Yes. And and the reason is, sustainability, and regulations. You need to have a certain amount of recycled content in your batteries.

Yeah. I guess that makes sense. That's how it should be, I think.

It should be. The problem is that the cost of producing that is is is very high. So it's it costs more to produce the same material, but from from circular sources than from primary sources.

And as long as that's true, recycling is always gonna struggle to compete with mining.

Mhmm.

And if that's the case, the only thing that's gonna keep recycling floating is regulations. And with regulations, you always have a race towards just complying. That's a that's a challenge. It it does it will not drive the market forward to increase recycling quotas and making recycling, like, really competitive towards mining.

But that's that's that's the key point here. Right? Because there's some materials or there's some things out there that you can buy whether recycled version or the second life version is cheaper. Okay.

A used car market. I know I know this isn't quite the same, but you'd expect to pay less for a used car because it's been used. Right? Mhmm.

And there's gonna be people in the comment section on YouTube saying, what a what an idiot. That's obvious. But this is this is different because if we want more recycled material in our battery cells moving forward, then the input costs are gonna be higher because processing them takes it it is more expensive than than than just getting them out of the ground because it's so cheap to get them out of the ground, which is sort of the problem, isn't it?

The beautiful future is that a used battery is very dense of battery materials. It only holds battery materials while the ground doesn't hold much battery materials at all. So when battery recycling is at scale, ideally and hopefully, and what we work towards is that recycled material is actually cheaper than primary materials because you have everything there. It's just about shredding and doing some leaching and some some of that cleaning, but it should be cheaper than mining. It just needs to reach a certain scale.

Interesting. And how how many so let's just take stock of the recycling industry then. So there must be various different ways to measure this, but how many batteries are really getting recycled? What what percentage of battery cells end up getting recycled? And I I imagine there's a geographical element to this. Yeah. What's what does that look like?

I don't know. And the reason is it's it's so hard to know. It's not tracked. I can there's an analogy that I I love to share, not because it's fun, but because it's quite horrible. In Europe, we lose track of forty percent of all vehicles on the market.

So of statistically, all vehicles that should reach end of life and you get a scrap certificate like this battery or this car has been recycled.

Statistically, we should have a lot more going out of the market. But because there's a such a gray market with illegal recycling or or export or so on, it's it's not it's just not tracked.

So we if we don't even know where forty percent of our cars go, we don't know where, you know, most of our of our batteries go.

So so for our listeners then, say we've got someone from one of the big asset owners, battery storage asset owners, listening to this podcast. If you're listening, we're calling you out. And they're thinking, right, we're gonna build a load of these battery storage systems, grid connected systems, so they're large. And we can choose between a load of different battery chemistries or suppliers. But we want the residual value to be as high as possible at the end of life. What's your advice to someone who's specifying a system, who wants to make sure that in year seven or year ten or whatever it is when they end up recycling these batteries, that they get a good a good whack for those batteries?

Here's a a conundrum or dilemma. You have to you have to, choose which way to go. So for, stationary storage LFP cells, iron based batteries are are are best. They have the longest cycle time, so they're designed more for stationary storage. On the other hand, it's there's no valuable materials in LFP batteries. So at end of life, your the residual value will be negative. It's gonna be a cost to recycle, at least today.

A mic drop moment there, isn't there? Because there's a lot of LFP systems being you know, the vast majority of systems are now being built with LFP, whereas only two years ago, more than half was in it was NMC.

Mhmm. And it's it's not a bad thing. It's just it's it's probably a bad a good thing because the I mean, the it it doesn't need any critical raw materials, which is a good thing from the very beginning. The the problem is that it's a high cost to recycle, but that's that's also gonna be solved over time when when recycling is is scaling up. So so I would still recommend LFP. It doesn't require as much rare earth materials.

It will come with a higher cost of recycling.

But in ten, twenty years when those are done, I mean, we don't know. There it's probably a good business again.

Yeah. There's definitely some more comfort in the original supply chain with LFP. Still not perfect, but pretty good. But yeah. So you say that the the residual value will end up being negative. How do you get a negative residual value? What does that mean?

It it's a cost to to take care of it. It it might be a cost to, pay for recycling so that the the recycling cost is, you know, higher than the material value that can be extracted from that material.

Whereas if you have NMC system, then someone will pay, though pay you to take take those away and recycle them to recover the the the minerals and the the metals.

Because of the cobalt contents.

Yes. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Interesting.

That might change. I mean, since, LFP is on the rise and NMC is is decreasing and cobalt is is not very is not a good sourced material, it might change. It might the demand for cobalt might decrease rapidly. And then It's out of batteries, isn't it? Yeah. And then no one wants to pay for cobalt. So maybe it's gonna be the opposite, but you want recycled, you know, iron from from batteries in in ten, fifteen years, and and it's gonna be the opposite that no one really wants to to to get cobalt because no one's gonna build cobalt batteries in ten, fifteen years, maybe.

You know what's what's most fascinating about this is because we have so much scaling up to do, and I talk about s curves a lot, but we we there was so much more efficiency to be achieved in the recycling part of the value chain that we don't really know what ten years will look like. We just know that costs will come down. Can I ask you a question then about who's liable? So if I if I go and buy fifty million pounds worth of batteries in the UK or a hundred million dollars of batteries in the US, who's on the hook for recycling? And how does that change from jurisdiction to jurisdiction? Actually, difficult question because UK is out the EU now.

No. It's it's quite similar. If you put it on the market, you have a producer responsibility.

So whoever puts it on the market.

Whoever put it on the market. And so who's who's that then?

Would that It it differs from case to case.

If you're an importer, if you you're the one, importing it and you're you're often the the producer or get producer responsibility. If you pay if you move it forward in a b to b transaction to someone who distributed to end customers, it's that distributor who puts it on the market.

Okay. So if I'm, for example, Gore Street Capital or Gresham House or Jupiter Power, one of these big asset owners, and I'm buying a lot of these systems, say, from CATL, who's then liable for the recycling cost at end of life?

It's a it's again, it's who put it on the market. That is is it the one that the the yeah. I don't know exactly how that's, you know, supply chain looks like of importing batteries, and you put them onto a stationary storage. You know, there's operators there. There's there's project developers. There's financing institutes. There's but I would say that the one importing the batteries.

Okay. But I'm actually I'm I'm framing that as if it's a liability, but it may also be an asset Yes. Depending on what the the the recycling world looks like at that time.

The problem there is that carrying the liability might be one thing, but someone else can have the potential of of getting the the the asset value. There can be an owner of that system at end of life who might sell the the battery to recycling, who is not liable for carrying the costs of recycling if it's a cost. So how it's solved today is that there is collection companies. So when you put a battery on the market, you pay a certain fee to the collection company who is a nonprofit who goes out and collect the batteries. That's actually how the the collection schemes for just triple a batteries is working today.

Oh, okay. So just scaled that up to much bigger wagons. Let let's talk about the regulatory environment and the policy environment then. So what's going well and what's not going so well? Are there any places around the world that have got awesome regulations in place that are really making this thing happen? Are there any lessons to be learned from other jurisdictions that maybe, aren't getting this quite right?

The the most important thing here is looking at what are we optimizing for? Are we optimizing for sustainability? Are we optimizing for rapid transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy?

Then I don't think the new regulations are playing very well to that. I would say that the new regulations are very, very good at protecting jobs, at, localizing supply chains, at, managing energy security, access to raw materials, and so on. But they're not great for optimizing for sustainability.

If we had optimized for sustainability, we would not put tariffs on Chinese EVs in Europe. We wouldn't have increased barriers of trading black mass around the world. We shouldn't put barriers of moving, waste batteries around the world to where they are better recycled.

This is like the big elephant in the room for this whole decade. It's like Yeah. Do do we want I I get both sides. Right?

We want manufacturing onshore. Do we want I I get the argument for protectionist economic policies. But if you really wanna speed up the decarbonization, we're gonna have to take Chinese PV solar panels and electric vehicles. It just it is what it is.

So very, very difficult choices for policymakers to to make.

Sounds like we've got the same problem with the black matter thing as well.

Yeah. It's it's all across the board. If if we want to optimize for sustainability, then we should make everything as lean as possible to make sure we've got as many batteries being used wherever they can in vehicles, in stationary storage, in home storage, in grid storage, in every single equipment that is today using fossil fuels.

But that's that's not what we're optimizing for. We're optimizing we have to balance that with with job creation, with access to raw materials, and so on. And to me, the the regulations are tweaked towards supply chain control, access to raw materials, energy security, and so on. And, I mean, that's fair enough. That's fair enough.

But I think that's not well communicated. And and there's some people lead with sustainability, but that's that's not what's being optimized for. But if if it'd be a a more I know you always end with a a controversial thought, but if I would feel it would be more honest if politicians would say that these regulations are not here to build sustainability.

They're here to to protect jobs.

Then and and that's fair enough. It's it's a it's perfectly fine argument for putting up regulations.

A bit like the inflation reduction act, which probably needs an another name. But hey ho. Hey. I wanna ask you last question before we get to the last two. Right? So you you think about the circular economy and battery recycling a lot. What what advice would you have then, or what suggestions do you have for manufacturers or recyclers or policymakers on getting things moving in the circularity world?

Making data more available. I think that's one of the biggest challenges today is the fact that there's no getting battery data is is very hard. It's a very protected IP. And, again, fair enough that battery producers wants to be quite hesitant with sharing information to the to the public market. Mhmm. But if you if recycling companies, their biggest cost is logistics and dismantling.

So before shredding, before all that ditching, it's about how do you actually take out the cells from the pack? How do you dismantle a a battery pack into something that can go into the shutter?

How do you transport those batteries? And it and if you don't know, if you don't have a data sheet, if you don't know even what is the chemistry inside of that battery, there's so much time and costs that goes into into that part of the of of recycling. And same thing with repurposing in Second Life.

How do you how how are you supposed to scale a company if you don't have access to the data of of of batteries out there? The data today has been shared between battery producer and car manufacturer.

They have perfect understanding of the of the batteries, but anyone on the, let's say, third market, anyone else who wants to buy batteries, it's very hard to access good battery data.

So that's a that's a limiting factor for repurposing and for recycling. Number one.

Alright. Now for the last two questions. So anything you wanna plug before we get onto your unconventional view?

I've thought of this, and I've heard that you also do an event. Right? A meetup of people in in your industry.

Yeah. We do events. We we love getting a community together, so we invest pretty pretty big in community stuff. Yeah.

Nice. Yeah. Same here. We have an event called Beers and Bats. It's been going going on now for, three years, and the next one is in January. It's in Stockholm.

It brings people together from it's it's grown beyond the batteries. It hasn't grown beyond beer. Maybe there's there's there's pizza, but it's now energy storage. It it's, from regulations.

It's from finance. It's from, like, anyone across the kind of transition. And to me, it's probably the best event in in the Nordics around Go on. People.

The whole world. So So it's the best just do it. No one's gonna call you out on it.

It's the best It's probably the best it's it's probably the best event in the world on on the show some of it.

Yeah. On on getting like, I'm so tired of all of these events where it's you have to, you know, wear a tie, and it's so formal. Here, you meet everyone from the same industry, but with a beer and pizza. The that's it.

So you meet the people behind the industry. And so far, I I know companies been built from it. I know that, you know, massive business opportunities come from it. And it's not because there's a nice presentation or there's, you know, business cards being changed.

People meeting. And, yeah, I so that's what I wanna plug. Come and join us in January.

January in Stockholm, the best battery event The best fashion world.

What is your contrarian view? What is the thing that you believe that not everybody else does?

I was in I I spent some time in Korea a couple of weeks back, and I was speaking with the Korean battery producers who were were talking about, you know, what what what do we do with China and, you know, how how is it now scaling up battery manufacturing while the demand for EVs is going down and and the battery industry is is built on offtakes with car manufacturers. Caribbean battery manufacturers has been doing this for twenty years, twenty five, thirty years. They have the talent. They have the industry.

They have the the skills, the expertise. They have the knowledge, the capital, the infrastructure. It's it's there, and they struggle. They struggle a lot.

So how do you how do you start from scratch? How do you build a European battery manufacturing industry when you you lack the talent, you lack the capital, you lack the expertise, the infrastructure? Everything needs to be built from scratch.

And I'm I'm quite worried about that. And but it is how it is. And we we can't change anything about that more than investing more, building regulations that fit the need for for scaling up battery manufacturing. But I guess the contrarian view is here is that, you know, building a talent pool that really knows how to build the batteries and and knows this industry well, That's not done over two years or five years or even ten years. It's it's decades multi decades long industry growth.

And and I wouldn't say that we've lost the game in in battery production, but we're we're quite far behind. And I believe the solution to this is doing like China did once.

They they got really good at manufacturing based on others' design. They copied. They pasted.

They've run a very, very long game slowly slowly getting better and better. I think we have to do the same thing here. We have to realize that we'll probably have to reverse engineer China. It's it's, you know, regardless, it's their equipment in the battery factories here anyways, and look at it on the long way.

We'll have to learn from them and look at them and copy them. And then over time, we can grow a battery industry. I yeah. So I guess that's got the that's the contrarian view is that we have to recognize that China is better and cheaper.

And it's not that it's cheaper and worse, it's cheaper and way better. And it's way cheaper.

That is the crucial thing. Right?

Yeah. And so that's where we're competing with it. It's way, way better. It's years ahead in technology, and it's cheaper.

Yeah. And and and, again, like, it is what it is. And we have to do our our best to to develop a a a supply chain that we are proud of, production gain and capability that we are are proud of and that we can control. It's it's just it's an ecosystem that that we have to build, and it it is being built.

It's gonna take time to get to where we want to be. And recognizing that fact, I think it's gonna it's important. It's also important for investors to understand it takes time for an entire industry to to grow. And and looking at Northvolt, they they're really working very, very hard.

They're they're they are putting their, you know, effort and time and sweat and blood and tears into into something that they believe in. And I think Europe believes in this as well. And we need to get, you know, a European battery manufacturing up and running. But it is it is hard.

And so I feel with Northvolt and the team there that's no one has done this before. Like, how do you build an entirely new industry based on, you know, on nothing? So giving them some some love and care and some empathy and some time and some an understanding that if we don't, you know, succeed with this, you know, Europe is gonna struggle for way longer in in building a localized production.

That was a very long No.

No. I I actually totally agree with you. I totally agree with you. My only comment would be, I actually think it's a focus issue.

I think, and this is as a I know the UK left the European Union, but I say this as a as a as a European, as a very proud European, that I feel like Europe is trying to do everything all at once. They're trying to compete on batteries. They're they're having a go at competing on batteries, on carbon capture and storage, subsidizing, you know, hydrogen is the next silver bullet. Now all of these energy transition technologies, and I think I think they need to pick a couple of winners and go hard at them rather than trying to spread the money because there is a limited pool of money.

And if they just chose even new nuclear, even large scale nuclear, right, which China's now got the edge on, we could which is difficult to do because you have to basically deregulate on a mass stale mass scale.

But Europe could choose a couple of key technologies and say, right, we're gonna win in those rather than spreading it all around. But, we shall see. Totally, I love the answer, Will, and I'm I completely agree with you. It's a difficult subject. Right?

It is.

There's there there can be what you want. You can hope for something. You know? I want us to have a world leading battery manufacturing facility in Europe or, you know, economy. And then there's a reality there's a realist perspective of maybe you gotta admit where some some games have already been lost and focus your efforts on other bits.

Yeah. And and you could take the solar panel industry as an example.

Exactly.

You know, Germany was passed, and then China took that.

And let's let's try and figure out how that doesn't happen to batteries, but sometimes you have to realize, you know, the the reality of things.

Well, a very upbeat ending to a great podcast.

Well, it's a pessimistic view. But Well, this is a problem with the contrary view.

Actually, it often kinda eeks eeks out the cynicism in everybody, but that's fine. So, Will, when I say a massive thank you for joining us on the podcast, we've had a great conversation. You mentioned a few things that we're gonna put in the show notes. If you like listening to this, make sure you hit subscribe.

I've been told I've gotta promote loads of Modo stuff. We've got loads of stuff being announced the next few weeks about the platform and new markets and loads of cool stuff. But But I'm not gonna bother with you you with that. You'll hear about it, and, see you next week.

Thank you.

Thank you.

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