Butter Bridge focuses its work on recovering critical materials for future generations and more European independence. These are raw materials that are essential to all of the products needed to ensure our energy transition. Think of solar panels and windmills, but also computers, smartphones, and cars. “Within Europe, we have large volumes of by-products and waste that contain these materials. But it has become the norm to send them off to Asia or Africa or,worse, to landfill them,” Steef says.
“In Europe, we’re great at sorting and separating waste. But that’s basically it. After that, our by-products and waste tend to leave the continent. Over the years, we’ve become used to exporting it. We simply no longer have the installations needed to process these valuable residue streams,”he adds.
About time
Butter Bridge’s ultimate goal is to reverse this process: “We want to make sure we can keep our waste and by-products here and process them ourselves. This allows us to separate the critical materials, so they can be reused here in Europe. It will make us less dependent on China and Russia as most of the related products are imported from there.”
And perhaps more importantly, it answers to the need to be more sustainable. “It’s about time we as Europeans start taking responsibility for our waste,” Steef underscores adamantly. “Critical materials aren’t critical for no reason. Europe is the only continent where it is actually still allowed to export these materials in large volumes. We should take this far more seriously and be an innovative frontrunner.”
Hence, the startup has built an all-electric pilot plant to process critical materials. Ultimately, this should lead to a full-fledged commercial plant that’s able to recover valuable materials like cobalt, nickel, vanadium and manganese by making use of wind- and sun-generated electricity.
A seat at the table
Participating in the 2024 BeStart program has served Butter Bridge well: “BeStart literally took us by the hand, guided us into the startup landscape,and helped us to come out with a solid story on the other end. For sure, it’s had a lasting impact on, not only our ways of working, but the way in which we present ourselves to the world. We’re mostly technicians, which makes publicr elations not our forte. Having had the opportunity to participate in BeStart has made all the difference to us.”
Steef: “The BeStart program really pushed us to dive deep into questions of marketability that, in all honesty, we were probably disregarding a little prior to participating. BeStart literally flipped our focus around from inward to outward and it’s helped our cause greatly.”
The BeStart philosophy has had a tremendous and lasting positive impacton their work and, perhaps even more so, on the way they are perceived by outsiders. “Let’s say it serves as a kind of ‘certificate of seriousness’. It has granted us a seat at the table. The shift has been very noticeable to us,”Steef says.
Being known
“Just seeing how much time and effort BeStart puts into providing accessto the overall network has been impressive for us to witness. It has expanded our own personal networks exponentially. We have links to so many new people and companies now, and we’re being known by so many new parties that didn’t know we existed before. Needless to say, this is invaluable to us,” he adds.
Also, being part of the tech ecosystem in the north of the Netherlands has proven to be very important to their work: “A lot of manufacturing expertise is available in the area. This turns out to be very practical: there’s simply a lot of people around that understand what we’re doing and the challenges we’re facing along the way.”
