For what it's worth, the articles Bruce posted have nothing to do with recycling. The first is about their deal with Prologium who are building a gigafactory in France, based on another gigafactory they built in Taiwan. The only (but not insignificant) interest for Neometals in this article is that when commissioned, the gigafactory will be producing @10% scrap in their battery process that will need to be recycled, and we are Mercedes' recycler in Europe.
The second article is a "hey this solid state battery optimisation thing is tough, but here are the people trying to do it" in which it refers to the Prologium-Mercedes solid-state deal among a dozen others, all doing solid state battery stuff.
The third article was published a fortnight before the first article, with Mercedes saying that their advances in their Lib's had been so strong that it might challenge solid state batteries for cost and energy density.
The last article is a rehash of the first one, two days later through a different publisher.
None of the articles mention recycling at all, the only company I saw mentioned that does recycling was CATL, but that was in the context of their solid state battery progress. Mercedes and CATL are forming a closed loop system for China, which is why NMT aren't looking into China for a Mercedes footprint.
I understand what you mean about diversifying research, to reduce risk etc, but not all things are done that way. Not only are we Mercedes' only recycling partner in Europe, we have staff embedded in Mercedes' R&D division working on battery science and production in order to make life easier for both parties at the other end (this was mentioned in the video someone posted in the last couple of days here). I really can't see Mercedes (or Neometals for that matter) allowing scientists from a number of different competititors to be in the room working on this stuff. For better or for worse, we are the Mercedes-Benz recycler in Europe, which is itself trying to come up with a closed loop for batteries.
Money is tight, for sure, certainly tighter than a year ago. But they did get strong institutional support for the recent raise, it was just weak at retail level.
Like you and basically everyone else, I'm not worried about lithium deposits in an old box somewhere. But literally no one is going to knock back another strong lithium find. I'm going wait and see what their special lighting has found before I ascribe it a value greater than zero, and even then it will need a lot more work to become meaningful, to anybody really.
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