The 6th CICERO Consortium Meeting
Overview
The Partners Showcased Significant Progress Towards Sustainable Battery Materials Production On 2 June 2026, partners of the Horizon Europe project CICERO gathered in Helsinki, Finland, for the sixth consortium meeting. Hosted by VTT. The meeting brought together representatives from across the consortium to review technical achievements, discuss upcoming activities, and align efforts towards the project's objective of developing methanesulfonic acid (MSA)-based circular hydrometallurgical processes for the sustainable and cost-effective production of NMC cathode materials.
Technical Achievements
- Encouraging results across all work packages
- Major advances in metal recovery
- Reagent regeneration
- Battery precursor production
- Process modelling
- Sustainability assessment
- Dissemination activities
Specific Advances
- Advanced research on advanced leaching and solution purification
- Conversion of recovered metals into battery-grade precursors
- Important milestones on reagent regeneration and iron recovery
- Modelling supports process optimisation via new thermodynamic models to support solvent extraction
Sustainability and Circularity
- Advancing sustainability and circularity assessments
- Health and safety evaluation
- Techo-economic modelling establishment
Future Plans
The meeting was also marlet with the second Exploitation Workship, during which the industrial partners discussed the scalability of the research. The meeting demonstrated once again the strength of the CICERO consortium and its commitment to developing innovative, circular, and sustainable solutions for securing Europe's future battery raw materials supply chain.