On 10 July 2026, Eni Storage Systems broke ground on a new lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery gigafactory in Brindisi, Italy. Weeks earlier, Spain's Institute for Diversification and Energy Saving (IDAE) confirmed an €81 million grant toward Hithium's projected €405 million battery and energy-storage plant in Navarre. Both projects are moving fast, and both are being built almost entirely around what happens before a cell ships, not after. That is the blind spot a genuine battery circular economy is supposed to close, and closing it is far cheaper to plan for now, while the sites are still under construction, than once the first batteries start coming back.
Eni Storage Systems, a joint venture between Eni Industrial Evolution and FIB (part of Seri Industrial Group), broke ground at the former Versalis industrial site in Brindisi in a ceremony attended by Italy's Minister of Enterprises and Made in Italy, Adolfo Urso. The plan combines a cell and module gigafactory with a battery energy storage system (BESS) assembly plant, targeting 16 GWh of annual capacity by 2030, split between Brindisi and Seri Industrial's existing Teverola plant in Caserta, enough to cover more than 10% of the European stationary storage market.
In Spain, Hithium's award under the RENOVAL 2 scheme was the largest single grant in that funding round, worth roughly half the total pot on offer. It sits within a €405 million investment by subsidiary Hithium Spain Innovation S.A.U., expected to create 700 direct jobs, with commercial operations targeted for Hithium's first factory in the European Union.
Both announcements led with jobs, capacity and timelines. Neither said anything about what happens to those cells at the end of life.
Most of the circular-economy conversation in batteries so far has centred on electric vehicles, partly because EU rules pushed it there first: due-diligence obligations and carbon-footprint labelling for EV batteries are already reshaping how manufacturers document sourcing and lifecycle data. Stationary storage cells get far less of that attention, despite using much of the same LFP chemistry Eni and Hithium are both building around. That is worth noticing precisely because LFP's growing share of the BESS market means a larger base of cells, sitting in fixed grid installations rather than moving vehicles, that will eventually need the same kind of material recovery EV packs do.
EV battery recycling had to be built after millions of packs were already on the road, scattered across owners, vehicle designs and chemistries that nobody had planned to collect at scale. That is a genuinely hard logistics problem, and much of the industry is still catching up to it. Grid-scale BESS sites do not have that excuse. They are fixed, single-owner, contractually documented assets from the day they are commissioned, which means cell manufacturers, grid operators and recyclers could in principle agree on a material-recovery pathway now, rather than once the first rack degrades below useful capacity. A process like NEU's electrochemical recycling, which recovers battery-grade lithium hydroxide and carbonate directly from spent LFP material, is the kind of end point that pathway could lead to.
The cells coming out of Brindisi and Navarre will need to be recovered. That isn't in question. To build a truly sustainable and circular supply chain, cell manufacturers, grid operators, and recyclers will need to keep having that conversation now - while the sites are still under construction - not once the first battery degrades.