![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Livium_-Envirostream-2.jpg\")
<\/p>\nA battery recycling company has raised cash to sort out a supply chain bottleneck in Victoria, but talks are still underway to match a federal grant offered in February. <\/p>\n
ASX-listed Livium raised $4.5 million from investors last week at the mini price of 1.25c a share, to build a single hub in Victoria where subsidiary Envirostream can both collect and process dead lithium-ion batteries.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Livium is also behind VSPC, a company that won $30 million from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA to build a demonstration factory in Brisbane to make lithium ferro phosphate (LFP) and lithium manganese ferro phosphate (LMFP) powders for battery cathodes.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It has until the end of the year to raise the matching funds, discussions for which managing director Simon Linge says are \u201cadvanced\u201d.<\/p>\n
Part of the most recent funding round will go towards exploring solar panel recycling and a University of Melbourne technology that can extract rare earths from electric motor magnets.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Image: Envirostream<\/p>\n
But the majority of the cash will go to beefing up Envirostream\u2019s operations, because right now it\u2019s operating out of two sites: a recycling site which is only functioning at 40 per cent of what it could do and a warehouse that stores batteries that have been made safe.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Livium managing director Simon Linge says the problem is logistics, as they can only accept and discharge a certain volume of batteries into the warehouse at a time, which means they need to slow deliveries which leads to irritated clients.\u00a0<\/p>\n
And with clients like LG Energy, Byd and Volvo, it pays to keep them happy.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Linge says they\u2019re aiming to handle between 15,000 and 20,000 tonnes of batteries a year by 2035, a significant proportion of a market he expects to be worth about $500 million.<\/p>\n
But today, the market for battery recycling is still very small.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Envirostream was a battery recycling pioneer but was too early for the first wave of dead lithium-ion batteries. Livium bought it out of financial distress in 2019, and it only made a maiden profit this year.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re pitching hard to still get more volume. The market today is maybe a 5,000 tonne market [total in Australia],\u201d he tells Renew Economy.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cMost of that still sits in warehouses and clients are still wondering what to do with it, or making a decision on when to have these batteries recycled. But we\u2019re having more and more clients getting their head around the fact that this is a dangerous good.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
The company recycles medium batteries, of the ilk that power lawn mowers, home batteries, and e-scooters, up to large devices such as bus batteries and grid-scale storage units.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Linge says they\u2019re starting to see volumes flow through from the 1 per cent of batteries that fail in their first year and a wave of first generation end-of-life batteries.<\/p>\n
Currently, Envirostream charges companies to recycle their batteries and sells the steel, copper and aluminium domestically and the graphite, nickel, cobalt and lithium \u2013 the so-called \u201cblack mass\u201d \u2013 to a partner in South Korea for a fee tied to London Metal Exchange pricing.\u00a0<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/RachelWilliamson-July2020-11-e1707446545797.jpg\"\/)
<\/p>\n