Altilium ACT3 Black-Mass Refinery (Plymouth)

Altilium Metals Limited's ACT3 plant in Plymouth, Devon — described by the company as the UK's first commercial facility for recovery of critical minerals from end-of-life EV batteries — received GBP 18.5 million in grant funding through the UK government's DRIVE35 Scale-Up Fund (announced 9 April 2026, one of the fund's first two investments, delivered by the Advanced Propulsion Centre and Innovate UK for the Department for Business and Trade). ACT3 will process 24,000 EV batteries per year using Altilium's EcoCathode hydrometallurgical process, with stated outputs of approximately 5,200 tpa nickel MHP, 8,000 tpa lithium sulphate (1,000 tpa LCE) and 5,400 tpa graphite; construction is planned from summer 2026 with commissioning by the end of 2027 and 70 new jobs. The release states only '5,400 tpa graphite' — it does not call the graphite output battery-grade or state its form, so the output is recorded conservatively as concentrate-form recovered graphite. Modeling compromises: the end-of-life battery/black-mass input is recorded as blended-anode-material (the vocabulary's closest token for recovered anode material), and the unstated-form graphite output uses the natural-graphite-concentrate token although the recovered material is recycled (mixed-origin) graphite, not mined flake.

Facts on this page last re-verified Aug 12, 2026 — the oldest verification date among its current claims. How we verify.