Formerly known as Circu Li-ion, R3 Robotics is establishing itself as an innovative player in automated disassembly, developing robotic solutions that unlock the recycling and remanufacturing of complex products, from batteries to industrial components. In this interview, R3 Robotics discusses the industrial, technological and strategic challenges that are currently reshaping circular value chains.

You often say that the crucial step in battery recycling doesn't happen in the smelting furnace, it happens before. What do most people in the industry still get wrong about where the real bottleneck is? 

The bottleneck is upstream, and the industry has chronically underinvested in it. Everyone talks about hydrometallurgy and black mass processing — that matters, but by then you're already working with what disassembly gave you. If that step is messy, material streams are contaminated and you lose value at every stage that follows. 

Clean, automated disassembly changes that equation entirely. When you separate materials precisely before any shredding happens, you recover critical minerals. You also cut the cost of every downstream step because the input quality is higher. The economics are compelling: you're not just avoiding waste, you're unlocking material value that currently gets destroyed before anyone even tries to capture it. Europe imports most of these minerals today, often through supply chains that are increasingly fragile. They're already sitting in end-of-life batteries on our roads. The question is whether we recover them properly or grind them into a mixed powder and ship that abroad for someone else to process. Clean disassembly is what makes the difference.

You've described personally disassembling batteries. What did that  experience tell you about why this can't simply be solved by hiring more people? 

It told me it doesn't scale. I'm not someone who struggles physically, and three packs in a day was my limit. These aren't consumer products, they're heavy, bolted, often glued, and live at high voltage. One mistake and you're dealing with a thermal event. The physical and safety demands are significant. Finding people willing to do this work consistently is harder than it sounds. You need technicians who are comfortable working around high-voltage systems, physically capable of handling components that weigh tens of kilos, and trained well enough to deal with the variability between pack designs. That combination is genuinely rare, and the people who have it have better-paid, less demanding options elsewhere. You can't build an industry on a workforce that doesn't want the job. 

Even if you could, the economics don't work. Manual disassembly is slow, inconsistent, and expensive per pack. As volumes increase, and they will, the first wave of end-of-life EV batteries is already arriving, the gap between what manual can deliver and what the market needs becomes unbridgeable.

A robotic system running two or three shifts doesn't get tired, doesn't need safety rotations, and processes every pack with the same precision. The cost per pack drops dramatically, and the consistency is what makes the material recovery economics work. Manual disassembly was never a long-term answer. 

Automation isn't just more efficient, it's the only version of this that actually scales.

R3 works with both recyclers and OEMs, two audiences with different pressures. What does each side actually worry about when they first sit down with you? 

Recyclers and OEMs come with different concerns, but both are ultimately asking the same question: does this work at our scale, and does it make financial sense. Recyclers worry about 2 things. First, utilisation, even if the robot works, can they guarantee enough volume to justify the investment? Second, flexibility, their human operator handles whatever arrives with enough training; they need to know a robot can too.   

OEMs come with partly similar, partly different pressures. Cost is always the first conversation, end-of-life battery handling is becoming a real line item, and automated disassembly has to demonstrate it's cheaper and cleaner than the alternatives. But the more interesting conversations happen when we get past that. R3's disassembly data gives engineering teams a concrete window into how their pack designs perform at end of life, which bolting patterns, encapsulation choices, and module configurations drive up disassembly cost, and how to design that out in the next generation. Some want to test second-life potential before committing packs to the shredder, which changes the economics significantly. 

But the conversation that tends to shift things is when OEMs realise they can get their materials back. Not as black mass powder destined for processing in Asia, but as clean, separated materials that go back into their own supply chain. 

Lithium, cobalt, nickel: recovered from their own end-of-life packs, feeding back into new battery production. That closes the loop in a way that reduces raw material exposure, lowers input costs, and makes them less dependent on supply chains that are increasingly unpredictable. Once that clicks, end-of-life stops being a cost centre and starts looking like a supply chain asset.

A lot of automation companies prove the technology and then stall. What's the gap between a robot that works in a lab and one that works in an industrial operation running at commercial scale, and how do you close it? 

There are two distinct challenges and people tend to only see one of them. The robotics and software required to handle real-world pack variability safely and at speed, that's hard. But deploying into a live industrial operation has its own complexity that has nothing to do with the technology, and that's where a lot of automation projects quietly stall. 

The deployment challenge is mostly about integration. A real operation has safety certifications, existing workflows, space constraints, and people who have been doing things a certain way for years. The robot has to fit into that environment, not the other way around. That takes time and close collaboration with the customer,  and it's where projects run into trouble not because the technology fails, but because deployment was treated as a technical handover rather than an operational one.

Pack variability is the other dimension. The installed base of EV batteries spans more than a decade of different designs, form factors, and chemistries. Any system that can only handle one pack type has a very limited commercial future. Building the flexibility to handle real-world diversity, reliably and safely, is what separates a proof of concept from an industrial solution.

Our facility in Karlsruhe is where we closed that gap. It's a working industrial operation, not a demo environment, and it's where we've stress-tested the system against the variability and operational realities that a lab simply can't replicate. That's the reference point we bring to every customer conversation. The companies that scale are the ones that treat deployment as seriously as development.

Europe has built a strong regulatory foundation for battery recycling, but  regulation alone doesn't guarantee industrial leadership. Where does Europe actually win, and what still needs to go right?

Europe has the regulatory framework and the industrial base. What it can't afford is to perform clean disassembly here and then export black mass to Asia for processing. The full loop has to close on European soil, disassembly, black mass processing, refined materials back into cell production. If it does, Strategy& (PwC) estimates recycled material could cover up to 30% of European demand for lithium, nickel, and cobalt by 2035. That's an €8 billion revenue opportunity by 2040.  

But that projection comes with a condition attached: processing capacities for black mass have to be established in Europe itself. That's not guaranteed. It requires investment decisions being made now, by industry and by governments, before the volume of end-of-life batteries peaks and the window to build that infrastructure closes. 

Europe is well positioned to lead this. The regulatory clarity is there, the industrial expertise is there, and the raw material, locked in end-of-life batteries already on European roads, is there. What's at stake is whether Europe captures that value domestically or hands it to someone else. That's not a sustainability question anymore. It's an industrial sovereignty question, and the decisions being made in the next few years will determine which way it goes.