CirIAMet

Smart Technologies to boost the Metals Circularity in the new generation of End-of-Life Vehicles

The CirIAMetproject aims to develop sustainable knowledge and technologies based on digitalization and Artificial Intelligence (AI), which facilitate the technological-digital and energy-climatic transition of the industrial fabric of the Basque Country towards a more efficient, circular and resilient use of material and energy resources, avoiding "downcycling" through the selective recovery of core topic and/or critical metals with high quality. This ensures the supply of secondary metal materials, while improving the competitiveness of metal and recycling companies (linked to sustainable and fair development ), through the transformation of the Basque industry based on technological development and decarbonization, reducing the environmental footprint of metallurgical processes. 

Framed in the Circular Economics , CirIAMet is a great opportunity to address the problem of supply shortages and instability caused by geopolitics and international conflicts, and to ensure the sustainability and resilience of the metal sector, strongly driven both from Europe through the European green pact (climate neutrality in 2050), and from local institutions through the new Energy Transition and Climate Change Act of February 8, 2024.

General objective

Principal Investigators

Tecnun researcher team

core topic

WHY IS THIS project NECESSARY?
 

The process of recovering components or being able to recycle depleted electric car batteries is receiving more and more attention nowadays due to the global momentum of the electric car and, in turn, to the scarcity of reserves of certain Critical Raw Materials that are part of these batteries. These materials are concentrated in a limited issue of countries, so that other countries and regions, especially the European Union, have a restricted amount of these mineral resources. Therefore, this project is necessary to reduce the extraction of critical materials from nature and, in addition, to guarantee the independence of the supply of these materials in the countries that do not have these resources.

WHAT SOLUTIONS IS THE CirIAMet project STUDYING?
 

The study advances the technological development of different solutions in today's complex battery recovery and recycling environment. This is a low level technology research project , which means that the developments are being tested at laboratory scale. However, the advances of all of them are in the line of facilitating the disassembly of current batteries in an automatic way, previously improving the separation of the different components with advanced AI techniques. On the other hand, other programs of study are focused on recovering valuable critical materials (such as Lithium, Cobalt or others) from the black mass by more environmentally sustainable methods than the current ones.

how does this project affect society?
 

This project is also analyzing the expected impact on society, in terms of circular Economics and sustainability, of the future implementation of these innovations, bearing in mind that intervening at one point in an entire supply chain can cause changes in the rest of the chain, with consequences that we should be able to foresee in advance in order to mitigate them in time.

Participating partners

The CirIAMet project consortium is formed by 7 agents of the Basque network of Science, Technology and Innovation (RVCTI) that provide essential fundamental and applied knowledge for the proposed goal .

Leader

Tekniker

Partners