DEScycle, a developer of circular metals infrastructure, has been selected to participate in the SPRIND Tech Metal Transformation Challenge, a highly competitive programme run by Germany’s Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation.
The programme is structured as a staged, multi-year initiative, beginning with an initial £1.3 million award and offering the potential for up to £5 million in total funding based on technical and commercial progress. Unlike conventional grant schemes, SPRIND’s model is explicitly focused on accelerating technologies through scale-up and deployment milestones, rather than supporting incremental research.
The SPRIND Tech Metals Challenge has backed a small cohort of technologies with the potential to fundamentally reshape how critical and precious metals are recovered, refined, and supplied at industrial scale. Participation in the programme recognises DEScycle’s differentiated process and its relevance to Europe’s strategic objectives around industrial resilience, critical raw materials, and circular supply chains.
DEScycle’s technology enables the recovery of high-value and critical metals from complex secondary feedstocks using a fundamentally different process architecture to traditional smelting and refining. By shortening value chains and enabling decentralised, onshore metals recovery, DEScycle aims to support more resilient and secure industrial supply systems. DEScycle will collaborate with Seloxium (UK), the University of Nottingham (UK) and Esy Labs (Germany) as part of the Tech Metals Challenge.
Critical raw materials such as copper, gold and rare elements embedded in electronics are increasingly constrained, while e-waste volumes continue to rise. SPRIND’s challenge is designed to accelerate technologies that recover these metals efficiently and safely, building resilient, circular supply chains. DEScycle’s low-temperature DES approach aligns with this goal by aiming to lower energy use and environmental footprint relative to smelting, and to integrate with modular pre-/post-processing steps envisioned by the challenge framework.
Participation in the Tech Metals Challenge positions DEScycle within a priority European industrial agenda at a time when governments and manufacturers are seeking alternatives to long, exposed, and geopolitically concentrated metals supply chains. The programme will support DEScycle as it advances from demonstration into deeper industrial validation, working toward commercial deployment with partners across Europe and internationally.
