Vianode runs synthetic graphite production at Herøya in Norway and has supply agreements with cell makers including General Motors' Ultium Cells. FAAM, based in Monterubbiano in Italy's Marche region, has been building lithium cell capacity at Teverola in Campania. Between them the two firms cover most of the anode chain: material on one side, cells on the other.
What the two companies did
FAAM recovered graphite concentrate from anode production waste and passed it to Vianode, which processed it through its own synthetic graphite manufacturing route. Tests afterwards showed electrochemical performance comparable to virgin graphite, according to Vianode. Both partners call the work a demonstration and say they now want to expand it towards industrial scale, as electrive reported.
Stefan Bergold, CCO at Vianode, said the aim is to return production scrap directly into the battery value chain "without compromising quality". FAAM chief executive Andrea Civitillo described circularity for graphite as a concrete and scalable industrial reality. Neither statement came with test data attached.
Scrap is not black mass
The feedstock matters. This project used production scrap from anode manufacturing, not shredded end-of-life cells. Unused anode material has never been through a charge cycle, and it is not mixed with cathode metals, current collector foils or electrolyte breakdown products. It does not need the hydrometallurgical separation that black mass requires, which makes the purity problem smaller.
Not trivial, though. Battery-grade graphite specs limit ash and trace metals to parts per million, and the particle size distribution has to stay inside a narrow window. Copper contamination from foils is a known headache in recycling. Sorting scrap at the factory gate is a much easier job than sorting it out of a shredder.
How much graphite is in a battery
The numbers are worth putting on paper. Industry rules of thumb put anode graphite at roughly 1 kg per kWh of cell capacity, with graphite making up about 20% of cell mass. A 77 kWh pack, a common size in European SUVs and crossovers, carries roughly 75 to 80 kg of anode material. Our EV catalog lists usable pack capacity for 67 models, so the per-car figure varies by a factor of three or more across the list.
Scale that up. A 10 GWh cell plant consumes around 10,000 tonnes of anode material a year at the same rule of thumb. Production scrap in cell manufacturing typically runs between 5% and 10% while a line is ramping up and settles lower once the process is stable. At 5%, a 10 GWh plant produces about 500 tonnes of graphite scrap a year, or roughly 1.4 tonnes a day. If European cell output reaches 200 GWh a year, that means about 200,000 tonnes of anode demand and some 10,000 tonnes of scrap at the same rate. This is an illustrative calculation with assumed output, not a forecast, and it shows the ceiling clearly: recovered production scrap can cover a slice of demand, not most of it.
Graphite is not in the EU's recycled-content targets
Regulation (EU) 2023/1542 requires recycled-content documentation for cobalt, lead, lithium and nickel from August 2028, and binding minimum shares from August 2031: 16% cobalt, 85% lead, 6% lithium and 6% nickel. Graphite appears on neither list. Nickel and cobalt recycling pays for itself, which is why those loops closed first. Graphite is cheap per tonne and often ends up burned for heat or left in residue.
Supply security pushes the other way. Natural graphite sits on the EU's critical raw materials list, and China has required export licences for spherical and certain synthetic graphite since December 2023. A European source of anode material is worth something even when the material price is low. Vianode also intends to work with the German recycler Cylib on closing the graphite loop, as electrive reported in June.
What the announcement does not say
No capacity, no yield, no energy consumption for the recycling step, and no cost per tonne against virgin material. Cost decides whether a closed loop gets built, because anode material is a low-value commodity next to nickel or cobalt. The test results are also described as a demonstration, without saying how much material was processed.
Charging behaviour is the harder question. Anode particle design sets how fast a cell can take power before lithium plates on the surface, and that shows up first in winter. A recycled powder can match a virgin one in capacity tests and still lose on rate capability. On most cars the limit is not the charger anyway, as we found when looking at EVgo's 750 kW chargers and what ten minutes actually delivers.
Cell makers qualify anode material batch by batch, and each qualification takes months. Until a cell producer runs the recycled powder through its own lines, the performance claim stays a laboratory result. Cheap European EVs such as BYD's Dolphin Surf are where anode cost shows up most directly in the sticker price. Vianode and FAAM say they will expand their collaboration. No date, tonnage or customer has been published.
