Childhood friends win £2.3m grant to boost incredible business

Local lads Anthony Hulmes, 44 and Ben Dawbarn, 44 are the proud owners of Ecoshred and Eco Lamp, local Warrington and Widnes based businesses.

The pair have recently been awarded an outstanding £2.3million grant from the government to develop a pilot scale lithium ion recycling plant which will be key to the future of recycling electric vehicles within the UK.

"Currently there are no companies in the UK recycling batteries in this unique way.

"This is because it’s extremely difficult to extract the raw valuable materials and also very dangerous,” Anthony said.

Anthony Hulmes and Ben Dawbarn, owners of Ecoshred and Eco Lamp (Image: Supplied)

The grant will be used to prove new and innovative technology that has been developed and patented not only to recycle lithium-ion batteries (used in EV’s) but also to extract the valuable materials, which can be used to make new batteries in the UK   

“We will be recycling these batteries in-house and extracting raw materials like Lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, manganese and aluminium from them ourselves,” he added.

Anthony, who grew up in Longbarn, and Ben who grew up in Orford spoke of how in the beginning they ‘identified a gap in the market’ for shredding and recycling important confidential documents held by individuals and companies.

Five years ago they acquired the business Ecolamp, which focuses on recycling batteries and hazardous waste on a national scale.

“We are extremely interested and committed to furthering our business with new and innovative technology,” Ben said.

Recently the pair were searching for new ways to expand their services when they came across an article written by Professor Andrew Abbott, an academic for the university of Leicester and a member of the faraday institute, about lithium ion battery recycling.

After contacting the professor, they discovered that Leicester University were researching into lithium-ion batteries. After working together on several projects this led to Anthony and Ben applying for a government grant with their ideas.

“We were the winners of the faraday Battery Challenge 2022.

"There were 84 consortiums and businesses battling it out, with several application stages and interviews followed by a final Dragons Den type scenario involving a panel of Judges."

Speaking of when they found out they had won the extensive grant, Anthony said: “We couldn’t believe it. We were absolutely ecstatic.”

The childhood friends first started Ecoshred two years ago after spotting a 'gap in the market'. (Image: Supplied)

Ben highlighted how one of the huge question marks under the 2030 zero emission plans, is how EV batteries will be recycled in a more cost effective and safer way within this country as well finding new ways of sourcing battery grade material to feed the UK battery production industry.

“As these batteries reach their end of life there is nowhere to recycle them unless they are sent abroad for costly disposal to places like France, Belgium and Germany."

“We are currently paying extortionate costs to do this and its estimated by 2030 this will amount to £1.2 billion lost in value to the UK."

“Currently the recycling of lithium-ion batteries can cost anything from £4,000 to £7,000 per tonne," he added.

“Businesses are stock piling end of life and scrap batteries in the UK as they do not want to pay to recycle them abroad.”

Expanding on the problems this can cause, Anthony said how these batteries are ‘extremely dangerous’.

“If they are not handled, used or stored in the correct way they can explode or catch fire. They are very dangerous.”

Working in conjunction with several leading businesses in their field as well as two universities who have developed this ‘patent pending’ technology, Anthony explained how the grant will be used to prove to the government that this innovation will work effectively to extract ‘black mass’, a valuable powder which contains the lithium, nickel and cobalt needed to make new batteries.

“The way you can prove it works is through the end purity of the black mass. The purity has to be above 95 per cent and we believe we can get it to 97 per cent.”

The process of finding out if the technology will be successful can take up to two years before the pair will submit their results to the government before being able to upscale the process to a fully operational large scale plant.

“We are extremely excited to be part of the solution towards creating a truly sustainable market for electric vehicles here in the UK."