Yesterday, France’s President Emmanuel Macron and Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne unveiled the new cabinet after a long period of deliberation. After Macron lost his absolute majority in the parliamentary elections in June, the goal of the new government is to reflect the changed balance in the National Assembly. However, Macron is sticking with familiar faces, especially in the crucial ministries. From the perspective of France’s opposition and media, therefore, no significant new impetus is to be expected, as Tanja Kuchenbecker reports.
It will cost at least $750 billion to rebuild Ukraine, according to the head of government, Denys Shmyhal, at the first major Recovery Conference in Lugano, Switzerland, on Monday. Ukraine wants Russia to foot the bill and the EU Commission has also already considered resorting to the use of Russian assets, as the financing of EU billions in aid to Kyiv stands on shaky ground. Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Economic Affairs Commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis were correspondingly coy in Lugano, as Eric Bonse observed.
In view of the growing importance of electromobility, the demand for batteries will increase massively. For Germany alone, the Öko-Institut (Institute for Applied Ecology) expects around 1.2 million metric tons of lithium-ion batteries to come onto the market each year from 2035 – and that’s just for passenger cars. The focus is not only on the production of the batteries, but also, with a time lag, on their recycling. China is still in the lead when it comes to battery recycling, but the market is also slowly gaining momentum in Europe, as Leonie Düngefeld analyzes.
The new government has 42 members, including the prime minister. It consists of 21 women and 21 men, with the men occupying most of the important posts. Many “old” ministers retain their posts, especially in the crucial ministries – including one of the most important figures in France and Europe: Economy and Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire. He is seen as a guarantor that the previous economic policy will continue constantly.
France’s media are therefore calling it “a reshuffle without much reach”, because there is a complete lack of new personnel impetus from the right or the left. Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin can expand his office. In addition to domestic policy, he will also be responsible for the French overseas territories in the future. Former Health Minister Olivier Véran, who unlike Le Maire and Darmanin belongs more to the left wing of the “La République en Marche” party, is also back. He becomes government spokesman.
Eric Dupond-Moretti remains Minister of Justice, Pap Ndiaye Minister of Education, Catherine Colonna Minister of Foreign Affairs and Europe, Oliver Dussopt Minister of Labor, and Sébastien Lecornu Minister of Defense. Europe specialist Clément Beaune is now responsible for transport.
From now on, Laurence Boone will be responsible for European affairs under Colonna. The 53-year-old economist specializes in European policy. She was economic advisor to former Socialist President François Hollande – as successor to Emmanuel Macron. Later, she was Hollande’s special advisor for economic and financial affairs in Europe and worked for the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development).
New important figures are emergency physician François Braun, henceforth health minister, and former MEP Christophe Béchu, who takes over the environment ministry.
The opposition was outraged by this large-scale reshuffling of offices without real change, calling it “musical chairs”. The far-right Marine Le Pen stressed that Macron had “once again ignored the decision of the polls”. The leader of the Rassemblement National (RN) believes that Macron has not made any real changes despite the parliamentary elections.
The left-wing alliance Nupes also criticized that there was hardly any renewal. Greenpeace France, on the other hand, regretted the election of Environment Minister Béchu, who had “no experience”. This shows that the president still does not really take the environmental issue seriously.
The new government started with the aim of reflecting the new balance in the National Assembly after the parliamentary elections in June. Macron’s various allies have been given posts in the process, including representatives of the centrist-liberal Mouvement démocrate and the center-right Horizons party.
However, the government does not have much leeway. In the future, it will probably always be a question of how it can secure majorities in the National Assembly. Above all, it must expect resistance from the strengthened RN and the Nupes in the future. Reforms will therefore be more difficult to implement.
Macron won the most seats in June with the Ensemble party alliance, but with 245 deputies, he is below the absolute majority of 289 seats. Thus, he cannot push through legislation without coordination with the opposition. The Nupes alliance has 131 deputies, including 72 for leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise (Indomitable France) party. RN came in at 89 seats after the party picked up only eight in 2017.
So it will be decided on a case-by-case basis whether Macron can win over deputies from the opposition with a legislative proposal. However, it is likely that he will often be able to count on the support of the 61 members of parliament from the conservative Republicans. In this case, however, they are likely to set conditions for their approval. Therefore, Macron’s policies could lean more to the right. For this reason, too, it is not surprising that many important posts in the new government continue to be occupied by politicians who belong to the right wing in Macron’s movement and come from the Republicans.
Coalitions are not common in France, which is why a willingness to compromise will now be called for. Macron had already called on the opposition to do so shortly after the parliamentary elections. He also emphasized that the French had re-elected him in April for his political project and made it clear that he would not accept too many compromises on it.
For the new government and the re-elected president, the main focus in the coming months will be on social issues in times of inflation. A bill to increase purchasing power is expected to be passed as early as July. However, France’s debt burden is already immense. There is not much room for social gestures, and the economic situation is more likely to deteriorate further.
The two powerful forces from the right and left in the National Assembly will be joined by the power of the street. It cannot be ruled out that the government will then have to back down and cave in on planned reforms.
Since the start of the war, the EU has already mobilized €6.2 billion in financial support for Ukraine, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in Lugano. “And more will come,” she announced. Economic Affairs Commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis reiterated the commitment to transfer €9 billion in liquidity assistance to Kyiv this year.
However, this money is primarily intended for day-to-day government operations. According to IMF estimates, Kyiv needs about $5 billion a month to pay wages and pensions and avert the threat of financial collapse. Another $100 billion would be needed to rebuild infrastructure destroyed by the war so far, Shmyhal said.
For financing, Ukraine is relying primarily on Western sanctions against Russia – and on the EU. Some $300 billion to $500 billion could come from frozen Russian assets, according to Schmyhal. At stake are central bank assets worth an estimated $300 billion, as well as the holdings of sanctioned Russian oligarchs.
However, it is difficult to confiscate and reallocate frozen assets. There are major, possibly insurmountable legal hurdles to this. The oligarchs would have to be proven to be directly responsible for the war or to have violated EU sanctions. The Russian Central Bank’s foreign exchange reserves are considered sacrosanct; by confiscating them, the West could set a dangerous precedent.
EU funding is also on shaky ground. The coffers in Brussels are empty, so the EU Commission has already considered recourse to Russian assets as well. Von der Leyen has also brought up the idea of debt financing along the lines of the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF). However, this has met with massive resistance, for example, in Germany.
In Lugano, von der Leyen and Dombrovskis dodged the thorny issues. They promoted a reconstruction “platform” that could be set up at the EU Commission. In it, investments should be bundled as well as the approach coordinated and resources channeled, von der Leyen said. The platform would be open to all major donors, Dombrovskis added.
It can be deduced from this that the EU does not want to pay alone. However, it does not want to set the tone either. “At the end of the day, it is Ukraine itself which will, and must, take ownership,” Dombrovskis said. Recovery must be driven by Kyiv, he said. Shmyhal agreed but also put pressure: “We need regular and strong support,” he stressed. The sooner the financial assistance starts, the better the reconstruction will succeed.
Now it’s certain: From 2035, no more internal combustion cars will be on the market; instead, electric vehicles will take over Europe’s roads. Mobility will then depend on lithium-ion batteries – and on their recycling – because the EU wants to achieve a circular economy and has to juggle raw material shortages. What is the state of the European recycling industry? And why are companies in China so much further ahead?
The Öko-Institut (Institute for Applied Ecology) calculated that from 2035, around 1.2 million tons of lithium-ion batteries per year will come onto the market in Germany – for passenger cars alone. Extrapolated to the EU as a whole, this figure would probably be three to four times higher. Then there are trucks and buses. Given the size of these batteries – that of a Tesla Model 3 Long Range contains 4416 cells and weighs 480 kilograms – we are talking about incredible amounts of waste. The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that the production of electric vehicles worldwide will generate up to 8 million tons of battery waste in 2040.
There is no alternative to recycling these batteries. Since 2006, it has been forbidden in the European Union to dispose of batteries in landfills. It has also become strategically relevant: Due to the Green Deal, the goal of a circular economy, and the race to become less dependent on raw material imports.
In a global comparison, China is far ahead: With 188,000 tons per year, companies there can recycle twice as many lithium-ion batteries as companies in Europe and have more than three times as much capacity as the US, researchers calculated earlier this year. They cited figures from the end of 2021.
In countries such as China and South Korea, recycled material was produced much earlier than in Europe or the USA, explains Matthias Buchert, Head of Resources & Mobility at the Öko-Institut. Since there was a market and larger production capacities for lithium-ion cells there earlier, the recycling industry was also ramped up more quickly. In a sense, companies there were already able to test and optimize recycling processes with production scrap and shortages. In addition, policies since 2012 have spurred the development of the lithium-ion battery recycling sector. In 2018, manufacturers in China were required to cooperate with recycling companies. However, many batteries there still end up in landfills or with illegal companies that recycle the batteries using outdated and polluting processes.
The European recycling market for lithium-ion batteries will grow incredibly over the next twenty years, delayed by the growth of electromobility, says Buchert. He expects it to pick up by the mid-2020s at the latest. Then there will be large-scale production scrap here, too – from the gigafactories that are now starting up in Europe. “After 2030, this will take on completely different dimensions,” says Buchert.
In the industry, the expectation is that there will be a division of labor in Europe, he says: “Probably a larger number of companies with smaller capacities will do the initial, mechanical steps of the process, and about a half-dozen larger companies will do the final refining.”
The largest currently active plant in Europe is operated by the company SungEel HiTech in Bátonyterenye, Hungary. There, 50,000 tons of lithium-ion batteries can be recycled per year. According to a study from the beginning of 2022, Germany has the highest recycling capacity in Europe: 54,000 tons of lithium-ion batteries can be recycled here. The REDUX company, with its plant in Bremerhaven, accounts for 10,000 tons of this.
In the coming years, several plants with capacities of several tens of thousands of tons per year will be added in Europe, for example, in Spain, France, Great Britain, Germany, Poland, and the Scandinavian countries. Northvolt plans to recycle 125,000 tons of lithium-ion batteries annually in Skellefteå, Sweden, starting in 2030. Belgium’s Umicore is currently planning the largest project: It will increase its recycling capacity to 150,000 tons per year, said its head of Government Affairs EU, Jan Tytgat, in Berlin last week.
Torsten Brandenburg, an officer at the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs, sees the challenge for the European market in the lack of investment. “We need to close the loop of the value chain in Europe to catch up with Asia,” he said at an EIT Raw Materials discussion. In addition to building up cell production, for which two IPCEIs are already underway, this hinges primarily on recycling. An IPCEI is also conceivable for this.
“As in any young market, the challenge in recycling is that companies first have to invest several million euros in the facilities,” says Matthias Buchert. At the moment, this is not really worth it: The batteries of e-cars have a useful life of ten years on average, so it will take time before recyclers even get larger quantities of material. Buchert speaks of the “chicken-and-egg problem”: The larger a recycling plant, the more economically it can operate – but only if it is working to capacity. “If you have spent batteries today, you first have to find someone to take them off your hands,” he says. “In turn, the companies that can or want to do that aren’t sure they’ll even get enough material, so they may be hesitant to invest in equipment.”
According to Environmental Action Germany (DUH), the problem in Germany currently also lies in the legal collection rate, which is not being met. According to the Battery Act, 50 percent of used appliance batteries must be collected, which exceeds the EU minimum requirement of 45 percent. According to DUH, the figure for lithium-ion batteries was only about 32 percent. Manufacturers must declare the quantities of batteries put on the market and take them back via their own take-back system or one of six established ones. DUH is therefore calling for cost compensation for collection systems, ambitious collection quotas, and a deposit system for lithium-ion batteries.
From when battery recycling will really be cost-covering will also be influenced by raw material prices. Minerals such as lithium are currently very expensive, and current studies also warn of bottlenecks due to high demand. If prices remain at such a high level and processes and logistics are quickly optimized, recycling could become profitable very soon, says Buchert.
An important signal to investors will soon come from Brussels: The EU will adopt a new battery regulation. This is currently in the trilogue negotiations. Among other things, the new requirements stipulate that car manufacturers are responsible for recycling old batteries from their electric vehicles, that new lithium-ion batteries must contain a certain proportion of recycled material, and that new batteries must be easier to recycle. Minimum collection rates are to be increased to 85 percent by 2030, and batteries are to be provided with a digital passport of origin. The proposal is being praised in various quarters as a milestone, as it regulates the entire life cycle of batteries.
Frank Schemmel is basically the gofer at data protection service provider DataGuard. This is by no means meant in a disparaging way but it is how the doctor of law describes himself in view of his diverse field of responsibilities. Schemmel joined DataGuard at an early stage when the company was still in the start-up phase. After several management positions and a three-month sabbatical, Schemmel is now part of the product development team. In addition to data protection, DataGuard also takes care of information security and consent management.
“If someone had told me that five years ago, as a business lawyer, I would one day end up in product design, I would have believed them because I’m very curious and think out of the box, but I still would have been amazed,” Schemmel says.
His career path is anything but ordinary anyway. Before joining DataGuard, he worked at the huge law firm Allen & Overy for several years. But instead of a fancy individual office and a predefined path in the internal hierarchy, Schemmel took a different path.
What is the difference between what he does today and what he does at the big firm? “There is one very big difference: As a law firm, you are always committed to the interests of the company. When a manager hires me, we work in the client’s interest and try to find the best possible solution for the client. As data protection officers, we are the trustees of those affected.”
Schemmel has made a name for himself as a certified data protection officer and proven data protection specialist. That’s why his expertise is in demand not only within DataGuard but also as a speaker at all kinds of conferences and conventions – such as the Bitkom Privacy Conference.
According to Schemmel, the ever-increasing complexity of data protection and the overall regulation of the data economy, also and especially driven by the European Union, is one of the major challenges. “That’s why a lone wolf, i.e., a single internal or external data protection officer, can no longer shoulder this at all.”
What Schemmel dislikes are arguments that data protection is primarily a brake on progress and innovation. “If data really is the oil of the 21st century, then data protection and information security are the environmental protection of the 21st century. Just think back: until a few years ago, environmental protection and sustainability were hardly an agenda for companies,” says Schemmel. Today, he says, environmental social governance is also high on the agenda of boards and executive committees. Schemmel, therefore, recalls corporate governance in the 2000s and general compliance and risk management in the 2010s.
Those who invest in data protection today will have a significant advantage and head start in the future with increasing digitization. Schemmel himself personally focused on data protection early on. As early as 15 years ago, as an intern at a major automotive supplier, he got to know the topic and sometimes minefield of data protection. He pursued his interest in data protection from then on, beyond the large law firm to DataGuard today. The investment seems to have paid off. Constantin Eckner
Yesterday, France’s President Emmanuel Macron and Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne unveiled the new cabinet after a long period of deliberation. After Macron lost his absolute majority in the parliamentary elections in June, the goal of the new government is to reflect the changed balance in the National Assembly. However, Macron is sticking with familiar faces, especially in the crucial ministries. From the perspective of France’s opposition and media, therefore, no significant new impetus is to be expected, as Tanja Kuchenbecker reports.
It will cost at least $750 billion to rebuild Ukraine, according to the head of government, Denys Shmyhal, at the first major Recovery Conference in Lugano, Switzerland, on Monday. Ukraine wants Russia to foot the bill and the EU Commission has also already considered resorting to the use of Russian assets, as the financing of EU billions in aid to Kyiv stands on shaky ground. Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Economic Affairs Commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis were correspondingly coy in Lugano, as Eric Bonse observed.
In view of the growing importance of electromobility, the demand for batteries will increase massively. For Germany alone, the Öko-Institut (Institute for Applied Ecology) expects around 1.2 million metric tons of lithium-ion batteries to come onto the market each year from 2035 – and that’s just for passenger cars. The focus is not only on the production of the batteries, but also, with a time lag, on their recycling. China is still in the lead when it comes to battery recycling, but the market is also slowly gaining momentum in Europe, as Leonie Düngefeld analyzes.
The new government has 42 members, including the prime minister. It consists of 21 women and 21 men, with the men occupying most of the important posts. Many “old” ministers retain their posts, especially in the crucial ministries – including one of the most important figures in France and Europe: Economy and Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire. He is seen as a guarantor that the previous economic policy will continue constantly.
France’s media are therefore calling it “a reshuffle without much reach”, because there is a complete lack of new personnel impetus from the right or the left. Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin can expand his office. In addition to domestic policy, he will also be responsible for the French overseas territories in the future. Former Health Minister Olivier Véran, who unlike Le Maire and Darmanin belongs more to the left wing of the “La République en Marche” party, is also back. He becomes government spokesman.
Eric Dupond-Moretti remains Minister of Justice, Pap Ndiaye Minister of Education, Catherine Colonna Minister of Foreign Affairs and Europe, Oliver Dussopt Minister of Labor, and Sébastien Lecornu Minister of Defense. Europe specialist Clément Beaune is now responsible for transport.
From now on, Laurence Boone will be responsible for European affairs under Colonna. The 53-year-old economist specializes in European policy. She was economic advisor to former Socialist President François Hollande – as successor to Emmanuel Macron. Later, she was Hollande’s special advisor for economic and financial affairs in Europe and worked for the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development).
New important figures are emergency physician François Braun, henceforth health minister, and former MEP Christophe Béchu, who takes over the environment ministry.
The opposition was outraged by this large-scale reshuffling of offices without real change, calling it “musical chairs”. The far-right Marine Le Pen stressed that Macron had “once again ignored the decision of the polls”. The leader of the Rassemblement National (RN) believes that Macron has not made any real changes despite the parliamentary elections.
The left-wing alliance Nupes also criticized that there was hardly any renewal. Greenpeace France, on the other hand, regretted the election of Environment Minister Béchu, who had “no experience”. This shows that the president still does not really take the environmental issue seriously.
The new government started with the aim of reflecting the new balance in the National Assembly after the parliamentary elections in June. Macron’s various allies have been given posts in the process, including representatives of the centrist-liberal Mouvement démocrate and the center-right Horizons party.
However, the government does not have much leeway. In the future, it will probably always be a question of how it can secure majorities in the National Assembly. Above all, it must expect resistance from the strengthened RN and the Nupes in the future. Reforms will therefore be more difficult to implement.
Macron won the most seats in June with the Ensemble party alliance, but with 245 deputies, he is below the absolute majority of 289 seats. Thus, he cannot push through legislation without coordination with the opposition. The Nupes alliance has 131 deputies, including 72 for leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise (Indomitable France) party. RN came in at 89 seats after the party picked up only eight in 2017.
So it will be decided on a case-by-case basis whether Macron can win over deputies from the opposition with a legislative proposal. However, it is likely that he will often be able to count on the support of the 61 members of parliament from the conservative Republicans. In this case, however, they are likely to set conditions for their approval. Therefore, Macron’s policies could lean more to the right. For this reason, too, it is not surprising that many important posts in the new government continue to be occupied by politicians who belong to the right wing in Macron’s movement and come from the Republicans.
Coalitions are not common in France, which is why a willingness to compromise will now be called for. Macron had already called on the opposition to do so shortly after the parliamentary elections. He also emphasized that the French had re-elected him in April for his political project and made it clear that he would not accept too many compromises on it.
For the new government and the re-elected president, the main focus in the coming months will be on social issues in times of inflation. A bill to increase purchasing power is expected to be passed as early as July. However, France’s debt burden is already immense. There is not much room for social gestures, and the economic situation is more likely to deteriorate further.
The two powerful forces from the right and left in the National Assembly will be joined by the power of the street. It cannot be ruled out that the government will then have to back down and cave in on planned reforms.
Since the start of the war, the EU has already mobilized €6.2 billion in financial support for Ukraine, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in Lugano. “And more will come,” she announced. Economic Affairs Commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis reiterated the commitment to transfer €9 billion in liquidity assistance to Kyiv this year.
However, this money is primarily intended for day-to-day government operations. According to IMF estimates, Kyiv needs about $5 billion a month to pay wages and pensions and avert the threat of financial collapse. Another $100 billion would be needed to rebuild infrastructure destroyed by the war so far, Shmyhal said.
For financing, Ukraine is relying primarily on Western sanctions against Russia – and on the EU. Some $300 billion to $500 billion could come from frozen Russian assets, according to Schmyhal. At stake are central bank assets worth an estimated $300 billion, as well as the holdings of sanctioned Russian oligarchs.
However, it is difficult to confiscate and reallocate frozen assets. There are major, possibly insurmountable legal hurdles to this. The oligarchs would have to be proven to be directly responsible for the war or to have violated EU sanctions. The Russian Central Bank’s foreign exchange reserves are considered sacrosanct; by confiscating them, the West could set a dangerous precedent.
EU funding is also on shaky ground. The coffers in Brussels are empty, so the EU Commission has already considered recourse to Russian assets as well. Von der Leyen has also brought up the idea of debt financing along the lines of the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF). However, this has met with massive resistance, for example, in Germany.
In Lugano, von der Leyen and Dombrovskis dodged the thorny issues. They promoted a reconstruction “platform” that could be set up at the EU Commission. In it, investments should be bundled as well as the approach coordinated and resources channeled, von der Leyen said. The platform would be open to all major donors, Dombrovskis added.
It can be deduced from this that the EU does not want to pay alone. However, it does not want to set the tone either. “At the end of the day, it is Ukraine itself which will, and must, take ownership,” Dombrovskis said. Recovery must be driven by Kyiv, he said. Shmyhal agreed but also put pressure: “We need regular and strong support,” he stressed. The sooner the financial assistance starts, the better the reconstruction will succeed.
Now it’s certain: From 2035, no more internal combustion cars will be on the market; instead, electric vehicles will take over Europe’s roads. Mobility will then depend on lithium-ion batteries – and on their recycling – because the EU wants to achieve a circular economy and has to juggle raw material shortages. What is the state of the European recycling industry? And why are companies in China so much further ahead?
The Öko-Institut (Institute for Applied Ecology) calculated that from 2035, around 1.2 million tons of lithium-ion batteries per year will come onto the market in Germany – for passenger cars alone. Extrapolated to the EU as a whole, this figure would probably be three to four times higher. Then there are trucks and buses. Given the size of these batteries – that of a Tesla Model 3 Long Range contains 4416 cells and weighs 480 kilograms – we are talking about incredible amounts of waste. The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that the production of electric vehicles worldwide will generate up to 8 million tons of battery waste in 2040.
There is no alternative to recycling these batteries. Since 2006, it has been forbidden in the European Union to dispose of batteries in landfills. It has also become strategically relevant: Due to the Green Deal, the goal of a circular economy, and the race to become less dependent on raw material imports.
In a global comparison, China is far ahead: With 188,000 tons per year, companies there can recycle twice as many lithium-ion batteries as companies in Europe and have more than three times as much capacity as the US, researchers calculated earlier this year. They cited figures from the end of 2021.
In countries such as China and South Korea, recycled material was produced much earlier than in Europe or the USA, explains Matthias Buchert, Head of Resources & Mobility at the Öko-Institut. Since there was a market and larger production capacities for lithium-ion cells there earlier, the recycling industry was also ramped up more quickly. In a sense, companies there were already able to test and optimize recycling processes with production scrap and shortages. In addition, policies since 2012 have spurred the development of the lithium-ion battery recycling sector. In 2018, manufacturers in China were required to cooperate with recycling companies. However, many batteries there still end up in landfills or with illegal companies that recycle the batteries using outdated and polluting processes.
The European recycling market for lithium-ion batteries will grow incredibly over the next twenty years, delayed by the growth of electromobility, says Buchert. He expects it to pick up by the mid-2020s at the latest. Then there will be large-scale production scrap here, too – from the gigafactories that are now starting up in Europe. “After 2030, this will take on completely different dimensions,” says Buchert.
In the industry, the expectation is that there will be a division of labor in Europe, he says: “Probably a larger number of companies with smaller capacities will do the initial, mechanical steps of the process, and about a half-dozen larger companies will do the final refining.”
The largest currently active plant in Europe is operated by the company SungEel HiTech in Bátonyterenye, Hungary. There, 50,000 tons of lithium-ion batteries can be recycled per year. According to a study from the beginning of 2022, Germany has the highest recycling capacity in Europe: 54,000 tons of lithium-ion batteries can be recycled here. The REDUX company, with its plant in Bremerhaven, accounts for 10,000 tons of this.
In the coming years, several plants with capacities of several tens of thousands of tons per year will be added in Europe, for example, in Spain, France, Great Britain, Germany, Poland, and the Scandinavian countries. Northvolt plans to recycle 125,000 tons of lithium-ion batteries annually in Skellefteå, Sweden, starting in 2030. Belgium’s Umicore is currently planning the largest project: It will increase its recycling capacity to 150,000 tons per year, said its head of Government Affairs EU, Jan Tytgat, in Berlin last week.
Torsten Brandenburg, an officer at the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs, sees the challenge for the European market in the lack of investment. “We need to close the loop of the value chain in Europe to catch up with Asia,” he said at an EIT Raw Materials discussion. In addition to building up cell production, for which two IPCEIs are already underway, this hinges primarily on recycling. An IPCEI is also conceivable for this.
“As in any young market, the challenge in recycling is that companies first have to invest several million euros in the facilities,” says Matthias Buchert. At the moment, this is not really worth it: The batteries of e-cars have a useful life of ten years on average, so it will take time before recyclers even get larger quantities of material. Buchert speaks of the “chicken-and-egg problem”: The larger a recycling plant, the more economically it can operate – but only if it is working to capacity. “If you have spent batteries today, you first have to find someone to take them off your hands,” he says. “In turn, the companies that can or want to do that aren’t sure they’ll even get enough material, so they may be hesitant to invest in equipment.”
According to Environmental Action Germany (DUH), the problem in Germany currently also lies in the legal collection rate, which is not being met. According to the Battery Act, 50 percent of used appliance batteries must be collected, which exceeds the EU minimum requirement of 45 percent. According to DUH, the figure for lithium-ion batteries was only about 32 percent. Manufacturers must declare the quantities of batteries put on the market and take them back via their own take-back system or one of six established ones. DUH is therefore calling for cost compensation for collection systems, ambitious collection quotas, and a deposit system for lithium-ion batteries.
From when battery recycling will really be cost-covering will also be influenced by raw material prices. Minerals such as lithium are currently very expensive, and current studies also warn of bottlenecks due to high demand. If prices remain at such a high level and processes and logistics are quickly optimized, recycling could become profitable very soon, says Buchert.
An important signal to investors will soon come from Brussels: The EU will adopt a new battery regulation. This is currently in the trilogue negotiations. Among other things, the new requirements stipulate that car manufacturers are responsible for recycling old batteries from their electric vehicles, that new lithium-ion batteries must contain a certain proportion of recycled material, and that new batteries must be easier to recycle. Minimum collection rates are to be increased to 85 percent by 2030, and batteries are to be provided with a digital passport of origin. The proposal is being praised in various quarters as a milestone, as it regulates the entire life cycle of batteries.
Frank Schemmel is basically the gofer at data protection service provider DataGuard. This is by no means meant in a disparaging way but it is how the doctor of law describes himself in view of his diverse field of responsibilities. Schemmel joined DataGuard at an early stage when the company was still in the start-up phase. After several management positions and a three-month sabbatical, Schemmel is now part of the product development team. In addition to data protection, DataGuard also takes care of information security and consent management.
“If someone had told me that five years ago, as a business lawyer, I would one day end up in product design, I would have believed them because I’m very curious and think out of the box, but I still would have been amazed,” Schemmel says.
His career path is anything but ordinary anyway. Before joining DataGuard, he worked at the huge law firm Allen & Overy for several years. But instead of a fancy individual office and a predefined path in the internal hierarchy, Schemmel took a different path.
What is the difference between what he does today and what he does at the big firm? “There is one very big difference: As a law firm, you are always committed to the interests of the company. When a manager hires me, we work in the client’s interest and try to find the best possible solution for the client. As data protection officers, we are the trustees of those affected.”
Schemmel has made a name for himself as a certified data protection officer and proven data protection specialist. That’s why his expertise is in demand not only within DataGuard but also as a speaker at all kinds of conferences and conventions – such as the Bitkom Privacy Conference.
According to Schemmel, the ever-increasing complexity of data protection and the overall regulation of the data economy, also and especially driven by the European Union, is one of the major challenges. “That’s why a lone wolf, i.e., a single internal or external data protection officer, can no longer shoulder this at all.”
What Schemmel dislikes are arguments that data protection is primarily a brake on progress and innovation. “If data really is the oil of the 21st century, then data protection and information security are the environmental protection of the 21st century. Just think back: until a few years ago, environmental protection and sustainability were hardly an agenda for companies,” says Schemmel. Today, he says, environmental social governance is also high on the agenda of boards and executive committees. Schemmel, therefore, recalls corporate governance in the 2000s and general compliance and risk management in the 2010s.
Those who invest in data protection today will have a significant advantage and head start in the future with increasing digitization. Schemmel himself personally focused on data protection early on. As early as 15 years ago, as an intern at a major automotive supplier, he got to know the topic and sometimes minefield of data protection. He pursued his interest in data protection from then on, beyond the large law firm to DataGuard today. The investment seems to have paid off. Constantin Eckner
