Mecaware facilitates the recycling of rare metals on Axel’One Campus

Mecaware, a metal capture start-up, joined the Axel’One Campus platform in March 2021. Led by its CEO Arnaud Villers d’Arbouet, it aims to revolutionise the production of critical and rare-earth metals through an innovative recycling process.

Launched in 2020, MeCaWare (Metal Capture for Waste Recycling) recycles technological products such as batteries in order to recover strategic metals (lithium, cobalt, nickel, etc.). MeCaWare is a spin-off of the ICBMS laboratory and is supported by Pulsalys. It relies on a chemical molecular and supramolecular process that uses CO₂ to extract various metals. The developed technologies allow for high levels of effectiveness and purity (from 98% to 99.9%), thus making the use of these metals much less energy-consuming. Thanks to this revolutionary innovation, MeCaWare contributes to a circular and more sustainable economy by offering new batteries to industrial companies.

Much like Axel’One, the start-up has also been awarded the Call for Expressions of Interest (CEI) for the Cleantech Workshops for the Vallée de la Chimie, on the campus of the Solvay research centre and close to the Axel’One PMI platform, dedicated to innovative materials. In this context conducive to the development of its technologies, MeCaWare has given itself the goal of industrialising by putting together a pilot for a future plant to be built in 2024, within the Vallée de la Chimie.