UK startup Altilium bags £18.5m to build Britain’s first commercial EV battery refinery

In short: Altilium, a UK clean technology company, has secured £18.5 million in grant funding from the government’s DRIVE35 Scale-Up Fund to build ACT3, the country’s first commercial refinery for recovering critical minerals from end-of-life electric vehicle batteries. Located in Plymouth, Devon, the facility will process 24,000 EV batteries a year using Altilium’s proprietary EcoCathode™ process, producing battery-grade materials with up to 74% lower carbon emissions than mined equivalents and supporting 70 new jobs. A second, separate DRIVE35 grant funds a parallel research project with luxury carmaker JLR and Warwick Manufacturing Group to produce, for the first time in the…