Recycling lithium batteries with bacteria

May 27, 2025

What if the breakthrough in battery recycling wasn’t high-tech—but prehistoric?

As the world braces for a flood of end-of-life lithium batteries from electric vehicles and electronics, recycling systems are struggling to keep pace.

Current methods are often expensive, energy-intensive, and environmentally taxing. But a small UK startup believes the solution might lie in nature’s oldest engineers: bacteria that have been around for tens of millions of years.

Cell Cycle, a startup under the SER Group, has developed a novel approach called LithiumCycle that uses engineered microbes to break down batteries and recover critical minerals like lithium, nickel, and cobalt.

Bugs, not big furnaces

These bacteria, which have shaped metal formations for millennia, are now being deployed to create a low-energy, low-emissions recycling process, potentially turning a major waste problem into a sustainable loop.

Max Nagle, who leads the company, explained that the idea stemmed from how bacteria have long been used in mining to break down rock and extract minerals. More recently, these tiny organisms have even been used to reclaim metals from shredded electronics. But for some reason, no one had seriously tried them on batteries—until now.

“There’s all this knowledge, expertise, and application in other industries, with batteries being such a massive concern right now, why has nobody adapted this for something that is so manmade, like a battery? Bacteria have a proven track record in other areas and industries, and are capable of recovering every kind of critical mineral you can think of. These bacteria have existed longer than humankind, they’re 50 million years old and have shaped our coasts, islands, the way that metal is formed and produced, and so on,” he told Engineer Live.

Tank over tech towers

That thinking led to a surprisingly nimble approach. While most battery recycling plants are designed around one specific type of battery and require huge investments in custom machinery, Cell Cycle’s process only needs a bioreactor tank. If demand grows, they don’t need to rebuild—they just need a bigger tank.

And because batteries contain far fewer types of metals, the task is actually more straightforward than some of the microbial challenges bacteria have already mastered.

At the moment, the UK has no battery refining capabilities of its own, so most battery waste must be shipped abroad for processing.

Cell Cycle hopes its technology will help change that. In the early days, the company focused on building out an international network to ensure batteries of all chemistries could be handled responsibly. But the long game is clear: bring the whole recycling loop back home.

With backing from Innovate UK and Coventry University, the team is scaling up quickly. A second lab at its Manchester headquarters is nearly ready, and Cell Cycle aims to launch commercial-scale operations by 2026.

Clean, cost-effective method

Perhaps most striking is how low-impact the process is. The bacteria used by Cell Cycle thrive at body temperature—just 37 degrees Celsius—and don’t need massive energy inputs. They can regenerate themselves, feed off CO₂, and even return oxygen to the system. The process is so clean, Nagle said, that it could end up being not just carbon neutral, but carbon negative.

“We grow the bacteria, we cultivate it, and once it reaches a certain point, we regenerate the bacteria. We don’t lose it as a byproduct of our recycling process, any kind of effluent feeds right back through the bacteria,” he said.

With mounting regulatory pressure, surging EV adoption, and increasing scrutiny over supply chains for critical minerals, Cell Cycle’s nature-inspired approach could offer the battery industry a much-needed blueprint for truly sustainable recycling.

As Nagle puts it, sometimes the most advanced solutions aren’t the ones we invent—but the ones we rediscover.