How Batrec Found New International Buyers for Its Black Mass Through Metalshub

As electric vehicle adoption and battery production scale up across Europe, black mass has become one of the region’s fastest-growing recycling categories, and demand from buyers who process it further into refined metals has grown alongside it. Batrec recycles portable batteries collected in Switzerland, as well as material from customers abroad, at its plant in Wimmis. The process yields black mass, a mixture of cobalt, nickel, lithium and other metals recovered from spent batteries.

For Batrec, finding buyers for this material and securing terms that reflect its true value sits at the centre of a market that, unlike more established metals, still lacks common reference prices and a settled base of buyers and sellers.

Batrec’s black mass carries a distinctive profile: high cobalt content, lower nickel content, and characteristics typical of mixed battery waste, since it is produced from portable batteries rather than the electric vehicle cells that supply most of the market. Benchmarking this material against generic black mass indices understates its value, and doing the calculation properly requires weighing metal content, quality deductions and current market prices against each other for every enquiry.

Reaching buyers for this material meant working in a market with no common reference prices. Offers arrived by email and negotiations ran one counterparty at a time. Reaching buyers in Asia in particular meant opening each relationship individually, with no way to run several conversations in parallel or compare offers on equal terms.

In February 2026, Batrec began using Metalshub’s Sales Solution to run structured bidding events for its black mass. Rather than approaching known counterparties one by one, Batrec now publishes a confidential enquiry with clear volume, quality and delivery terms, and invites qualified buyers on the platform to submit bids within a set window. Only the winning price is disclosed, and every offer is visible to Batrec in one place for direct comparison.

The approach let Batrec test its material against a wider pool of buyers than any single network could reach, while keeping full control over who could see the enquiry and participate.

Batrec’s first bidding event, held in March 2026, offered several hundred tonnes of NMC black mass over a multi-month delivery period. The enquiry drew views from 34 companies across Europe and Asia, resulting in 18 offers and 13 separate negotiations, with counterparties new to Batrec. Competitive bidding gave Batrec a market-tested price for a material that generic indices struggle to value.

A second event followed in April and May 2026 for LFP black mass. The enquiry drew views from 32 companies and led to a focused negotiation with a new counterparty, showing that a structured process can bring buyers to material grades that have no established reference price and no settled base of buyers.

Batrec will continue to use the platform as one of several routes to market, as part of a broader effort to build a more transparent and efficient market for battery recycling materials. The company may also explore bringing further by-products of its recycling process to market this way.