A Chinese research team has received two major honors at the 2026 European Inventor Award for its breakthrough Directional Recycling Technologies (DRT), an innovative process that keeps valuable battery materials in a closed-loop cycle instead of reducing them to basic chemical elements.

The awards, presented by the European Patent Office in July, recognize a technology capable of recovering 99.6% of nickel, cobalt and manganese, along with 96.5% of lithium from spent batteries, at a purity suitable for manufacturing new batteries. So, what makes the technology different?