With the electrification of transport, the use of batteries is growing rapidly. In Spain, for example, more than 200,000 battery units from the industrial, automotive and portable sectors were withdrawn in 2021 alone. This situation raises significant environmental, industrial and logistical challenges: once batteries reach the end of their useful life, how can they be managed in an efficient, sustainable and safe way?

REVIA has been launched to address this challenge. It is a collaborative project involving inèdit that seeks to transform the current battery management model—specifically, the industrial processes linked to the manufacturing, reconditioning and traceability of second-life batteries. Batteries retain sufficient storage capacity to be given a second life when reused in light vehicles, such as bicycles, mopeds, motorcycles, electric tricycles and small urban vehicles for people and logistics.

REVIA is structured around three main lines of innovation. The first focuses on the design, development and validation of sensorised polymer enclosures to improve thermal efficiency, operational traceability and battery reconditioning capabilities. The second line involves the development of a digital twin of production processes, enabling scenarios to be simulated, analysed and optimised before physical implementation. This will reduce scrap generation, minimise risks and improve the overall sustainability of the plant.

Finally, the project’s cross-cutting axis centres on environmental assessment, circularity and eco-design, in line with European policies on circular economy and energy efficiency.

In this regard, one of the main challenges posed by batteries is the current limited ability to recover critical raw materials such as lithium, cobalt, nickel and graphite, whose extraction has significant environmental impacts and high energy costs.

At the same time, battery design often hinders disassembly, repair and reuse, limiting their potential for a second useful life. In addition, there is a lack of standardised eco-design criteria applied systematically, and sustainability data such as life cycle assessment (LCA) and circularity indicators are not yet integrated.

In this area, inèdit will play a key role in the project, contributing its expertise in environmental assessment, circular economy and eco-design. It will be responsible for calculating the environmental impacts associated with the different solutions developed, analysing their circularity potential and defining sustainability criteria to guide the design of batteries and associated processes towards more efficient and resilient models. This approach will help identify improvement opportunities, reduce environmental impacts throughout the life cycle and strengthen decision-making based on robust environmental criteria.

The project is coordinated by CIAC and involves the participation of the MAV Cluster, the Digital Cluster, the Spanish Plastics Centre, and a group of specialised technology SMEs: Leartiker, Thinex Rotimpres, Cadtech and inèdit. In addition, it is based on a real industrial use case with MillorBattery, a battery manufacturer acting as a demonstrator company, enabling the validation of the solutions developed in an industrial environment.

The REVIA project (file reference AEI-010700-2025-1) is being carried out within the framework of the 2025 call for “Aid to support innovative business clusters to improve their competitiveness and contribution to strategic autonomy” by the Spanish Ministry of Industry and Tourism, as part of the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan (PRTR).