£3m · Grant · Cleantech · Manchester, UK
Watercycle Technologies, a Manchester-based developer of modular mineral-recovery and water-treatment systems, has secured £3m in UK government grant funding toward the £6m ReLiVE project. Awarded through the DRIVE35 Scale Up Fund, the grant will support a 36-month programme that is due to begin in April 2027, rather than an already-operating production line.
Turning waste streams into battery-grade supply
ReLiVE will design, build and operate a pilot-to-demonstration-scale line using Watercycle’s Direct Lithium Extraction and Crystallisation technology. The company says the system will recover lithium from industrial wastewater and lithium-bearing material produced by battery recycling, then refine it into high-purity salts suitable for electric-vehicle batteries. The project will also assess environmental and economic performance and work with UK refining, battery and automotive partners to test whether the output meets industry requirements.
The commercial mechanism is more specific than simply selling recovered minerals. Watercycle is developing modular systems that can sit close to waste or refining operations, turning a treatment liability into feedstock while producing clean water as a co-product. A successful demonstration would give potential customers evidence on purity, throughput, operating cost and carbon performance before they commit to larger installations. That validation matters because the grant covers only half of the stated project cost, while the company and its partners still need to prove reliable, competitive production at a larger scale.
From university research to industrial validation
Watercycle emerged from University of Manchester research by co-founders Sebastian Leaper and Ahmed Abdelkarim. The university reported in 2023 that the company’s patented filtration process selectively extracts lithium from brines and water solutions. A 2024 financing announcement said the team had produced more than 100kg of battery-grade lithium carbonate at pilot scale before raising £4.4m in equity and grant funding.
The company is also testing routes to market alongside its technical scale-up. In February 2026, Watercycle and Tees Valley Lithium announced a non-binding framework to evaluate an on-site recovery system under a build-own-operate model and a possible future recycled-lithium supply arrangement. Those plans remain conditional, but they show how the technology could generate recurring project and supply economics if ReLiVE’s larger demonstration validates the process.
The grant therefore funds a bridge between technical proof and customer-grade deployment. It does not establish that commercial-scale output has begun; the most consequential milestones will arrive after the project starts in April 2027, when Watercycle must translate pilot results into a line that consistently produces material battery customers can qualify.
