Battery recycling startup Tozero just raised 3.4 M in their pre-seed round. Atlantic Labs. Verve Ventures, Possible Ventures, and other angel investors and founders including former VW board member Jochem Heizmann all invested in this German-based company.
Tozero is a women-led startup. The founders, Sarah Fleischer and Dr. Ksenija Milicevic Neumann are planning to use these funds to open a prototype battery recycling facility in Munich. Munich is not only at the very heart of Europe but it will also be the place where one-third of Europe’s lithium-ion batteries will be produced by 2030.
What makes Tozero stand out?
Tozero is able to recover rare materials such as lithium, nickel, and cobalt from lithium-ion batteries. This means not only eliminating all the toxic waste from the batteries but will help Europe achieve more independence in EVs and battery production.
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By creating a circular economy system around these materials, companies will be able to avoid further mining for such materials – very often in developing countries – and with devastating environmental effects as it is happening now. This will also have another benefit: with the current ongoing geopolitical instability and supply chain crisis, companies – and countries – need to rethink how they do their business and try to rely as much as they can on their own resources. Reusing rare materials seems like a step in the right direction.
Why Now
Switching to EVs could be crucial in the efforts to reduce the negative effects of climate change. But in order to build new EVs, it is simply not sustainable to keep looking for raw materials below the earth’s surface. Recovering what is currently available and used seems a much better option
With the help of experts including Prof. Bernd Friedrich – a pioneer in battery recycling research at IME, RWTH Aachen University – Tozero hopes to recover more raw materials compared to its competitors, plans to produce batteries with these recycled materials, and finally sell them to EV makers.
Editor’s Note: The opinions expressed here by Impakter.com columnists are their own, not those of Impakter.com –In the Featured Photo: A Porsche EV charging. Photo credit: Unsplash.
