Refinyx
Refinyx provides industrialized technology for recovering critical materials—nickel, cobalt, lithium, rare earth elements, and phosphorus—from waste streams like battery black mass, phosphogypsum, and sewage ash. The company's process chemistry platform, proven at a 9,000-ton-per-year battery-grade refinery, achieves 99.9% product purity and over 97% metal recovery. Refinyx deploys its technology through licensing, joint ventures, or full solution delivery, with partners supplying the site, feedstock, and capital.
- Clean Technology
- Chemical Technology
- Manufacturing / Industry 4.0
- Battery Technology
Funding
Founders
Founder details are not available yet.
Product
Problem
Western economies ship dead batteries thousands of miles overseas to be refined and then buy the resulting metals back, leaving themselves dependent on foreign supply chains for materials essential to clean-energy technologies. Valuable rare earth elements remain locked in phosphogypsum stacks, and phosphorus is lost in sewage ash, while the domestic refining capacity needed to reclaim these materials does not exist.
Solution
Refinyx provides industrialized technology for recovering critical materials from waste streams, enabling partners to refine them profitably at scale without requiring government subsidies or green premiums. The company's process chemistry platform, rebuilt from first principles, handles NMC and LFP battery black mass, rare earth element concentrates from phosphogypsum, and phosphorus recovery from municipal sewage ash. Refinyx deploys its technology through licensing, joint ventures, or full solution delivery, providing the flowsheet, engineering package, and commissioning support while partners supply the site, feedstock, and capital. The core technology was proven at a 9,000-ton-per-year battery-grade refinery built and operated outside Asia, and the current version offers over 25% lower operating costs than that first-generation plant.
Target Audience
Primary customers are battery manufacturers and OEMs, recyclers producing black mass but lacking refining capability, mining and metals companies, phosphorus and fertilizer producers, and infrastructure or energy investors seeking to build circular materials facilities.
Features
- Includes 135 patents covering hydrometallurgical and pyrometallurgical processes for recovering battery-grade nickel, cobalt, lithium, rare earth elements, and phosphorus
- Achieves 99.9% product purity and greater than 97% metal recovery across multiple feedstock types
- Supports both NMC black mass recycling (battery-grade nickel, cobalt, and lithium hydroxide) and LFP recycling (battery-grade lithium carbonate, iron phosphate, and graphite)
- REE process retrofits existing phosphogypsum and phosphate rock sites, avoiding greenfield construction
- Operates a 1,200 m² pilot plant and laboratory in Västerås, Sweden, capable of bench-scale to 50 kg/h continuous testing for process de-risking
- Offers three deployment models—license, full solution delivery, and joint venture—to accommodate partners with different capital and operational capabilities
- Global collaboration with Alfa Laval on crystallization systems for separation, purification, and final product recovery in critical materials refining