More than 85% of the world's battery black mass gets refined in one country. China. A New Zealand company wants to move that work to where the batteries die.
In July it spun its battery-recovery arm into a separate company, Linca, with £8.1 million in UK consortium backing behind it.
The bet: city-scale refineries that keep lithium, nickel and cobalt onshore, where battery-grade metal demand is set to double within a decade.
This is not a lab concept. Mint's printed-circuit-board recovery line has shipped certified closed-loop copper to HP. The battery piece is now standing on its own.
TIMELINE: Mint Innovation & Linca
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
2016 ──── 2022 ──── 2026 ──── ◉ NOW ──── 2027 ──── 🔥 NEXT
💧 🏆 🧩 ⚙️ 🏭 🔋
Founded WEF HP Linca UK demo US scale
in NZ Pioneer copper spin-out facility to follow
Company chronology: Mint Innovation, founded 2016 (company materials)
The copper line that made biology boring
Mint started in 2016 in Auckland with a proposition that sounded too clean: recover metals from electronic waste without smelting. The process it commercialized is hydrometallurgical, wet chemistry instead of high heat, and the company describes it as low-carbon. It works on printed circuit boards, the richest vein of copper and precious metals sitting in the world's drawers.
The economics did the selling. A $60 million Series C in 2023 gave it room to build compact, city-scale facilities rather than the industrial plants the sector usually demands.
By March 2026, the approach produced what the company calls the industry's first certified batch of closed-loop recycled copper, made in partnership with HP. That certification matters. Recyclers can claim green metal; buyers need it verified.
Why battery metal recovery split off
Battery black mass is a different animal. It is the shredded, metal-rich powder left after end-of-life EV packs are dismantled, concentrated lithium, nickel, cobalt and manganese in a carbon matrix. Refining it has historically meant high-heat processing that loses lithium, or solvent-heavy extraction that loses money at city scale.
Linca's process does away with solvent-based extraction entirely. That removes cost and complexity, which is what a compact urban refinery needs to work.
The timing is deliberate. More than 85% of the world's black mass refining happens in China, and critical battery mineral demand is expected to double over the next decade. When the raw material and the refining are both offshore, a domestic EV industry holds no strategic ground.
The money behind the split
Linca launched with a UK demonstration facility already under development, backed by an £8.1 million consortium that includes Jaguar Land Rover, LiBatt Recycling and the University of Warwick's Warwick Manufacturing Group. Of that total, £4.05 million came from the UK Department for Business and Trade through the Advanced Propulsion Centre.
Offshore refining concentration
Benchmark Minerals figures cited by Linca's CEO as the core supply-chain problem the company targets · Resource Recycling, 2026
Seed funding from Motion Capital has reached its first close, with a separate NZ$5 million round (about $2.92 million US) earmarked for the UK project. Ollie Crush, who co-founded Mint and served as its chief science officer, left to run Linca.
An onshore play dressed as a chemistry problem
Crush frames it as sovereignty. "This can enable critical mineral sovereignty. It enables smaller scale domestic refineries. This can keep minerals on shore," he told Resource Recycling.
The same logic is moving regulators. A presidential order in late July let the US Commerce Department block critical mineral exports, and House committees advanced three bills expanding domestic recycling capacity. The policy tailwind is real, even if the technology is young.
Mint keeps a minority stake in Linca. The two companies share an Auckland headquarters, and Crush jokes they share the same coffee machine. The operational separation is about focus, not distance.
Where the plan gets tested
None of this is proven at scale yet. Linca's demonstration facility in the UK is the first real test of the solvent-free process on continuous throughput, and Crush expects a year or more of work before wider commercialization follows. The US facility Mint is building in Longview, Texas, targets a 2027 launch for e-scrap copper recovery.
The pressure is on the cost curve. Battery recycling's economics depend on the gap between black mass prices and recovered metal values, and that gap shifts with every cobalt price swing. A clean process is worth little if the input stream is too small to keep a city-scale line busy.
Whether the UK demo facility hits its timeline through 2027
First commercial battery-grade lithium or nickel batches, not just announcements
Cobalt price direction, which sets the whole recovery margin
Follow-on funding after Motion Capital's first close
The interesting comparison is the chemical rather than the biology. Competitors like Nth Cycle, which is taking an electrochemical route and moving toward a public listing, prove the market for onshore critical-mineral recovery is real. Linca's differentiation is the claim that its process needs no solvents at all.
The investor case, stated plainly
Keep the expectations modest. Battery-metal recovery is a capital-heavy sector where announcements outpace output, and the history of recycling start-ups is full of plants that never opened.
The durable signal here is strategic, not financial: every major economy is building an onshore critical-minerals position, and biology-based recovery is now part of that policy stack. Companies that can point to certified output, like Mint's HP copper, have moved past the demonstration phase.
As we wrote in August with Epoch Biodesign's monomer recovery work, the biological recycling story keeps producing real operators. The question is which ones survive contact with the price of cobalt.