A Chinese energy equipment company, Jereh, says its plant has hit 98% metal recovery and turned a profit in year one, but the numbers are company reported, the EU's recycled content thresholds are still being set, and no one has proven the supply chain can meet them.
By the time every new EV battery sold in Europe has to carry a minimum share of recycled lithium, cobalt, and nickel, the industry will need a recycling supply chain that, on current evidence, does not exist yet. That is the gap a Yantai-headquartered energy-equipment company named Jereh is trying to fill, and the gap that turns a single Chinese plant announcement into a question with global stakes.
The EU's Battery Regulation, in force since 2023 and tightening through the back half of the decade, requires that batteries placed on the European market meet recycled-content minimums, disclose a carbon footprint, and assign end-of-life responsibility to producers. The recycled-content thresholds and the disclosure rules are still being finalized, but the obligations themselves are not negotiable. A battery sold into the EU in the early 2030s will have to be made, in part, from metal that was already inside a battery once before.
That is harder than it sounds. Lithium-ion cells come in several chemistries, but the dominant one in mass-market EVs and grid storage is LFP, or lithium iron phosphate, which uses no cobalt or nickel at all. LFP is cheap, safe, and long-lived, which is why it now accounts for the majority of cells shipped globally. It is also awkward for recyclers: a stream built around recovering cobalt and nickel has to be rethought when the value is in the iron and the phosphate.
Black mass is what recyclers actually sell. When a spent battery is shredded, sorted, and separated, the output is a dark powder containing lithium, cobalt, nickel, manganese, and other metals, and the spec a buyer grades on is the recovery rate and the purity of that powder. Most recycling industry estimates put black-mass recovery and purity well below the levels the EU's recycled-content thresholds will require, and the downstream capacity to upgrade black mass back to battery-grade cathode material is even thinner.
Jereh is one of a growing set of operators trying to close that gap. The company, originally an oilfield-services business based in Yantai in China's Shandong province, says it has run more than 15,000 tons of feedstock through a recycling facility in Zhengzhou, kept utilization above 80%, and reached profitability within its first year of operation, according to a company press release distributed via PR Newswire. The same release reports black-mass recovery and purity above 98% and copper-and-aluminum separation efficiency of up to 96%, both figures that, if verified, would put the plant at the top of the industry.
Those figures have not been independently audited in any source available to a reader. Independent benchmarking for LFP black-mass recovery, battery-grade purity, and audited carbon footprint per ton of feedstock does not yet exist in the public domain at the scale the EU rules will demand, and the same press release is the only public reference for Jereh's throughput, utilization, recovery, and profitability claims. Jereh's expansion slate, including a cathode-material regeneration line and partnership announcements covering South Korea, Australia, Hungary, the United States, and a project in Abu Dhabi with a partner named Witthal Gulf, sits in the same company-issued document.
The reason those numbers matter is not the company. It is the rule. If even one recycler has genuinely crossed from pilot to commercially proven, high-recovery, profitable LFP processing with an audited carbon footprint, the EU's recycled-content mandate goes from a wish to a supply chain. If none have, the mandate becomes a forcing function that decides, in the late 2020s, which chemistries can be sold in Europe at all.
What to watch: the EU's finalized recycled-content thresholds and the dates they take effect, the first independently audited recoveries from a commercial-scale LFP line, and whether any recycled cathode material a cell maker actually buys carries a verifiable battery-grade spec, not a company-issued one. The answer will not come from a press release.