Sustainability

Committed to a sustainable future

Much of our business is focused on the energy transition. For example, Intercel Electrification aims to accelerate the transition from fossil fuel use of mobile machinery to electricity by producing robust and technologically advanced batteries. And Intercel ESS (Energy Storage Systems) aims to make the renewable energy resources needed for this available at all times by providing high-quality energy storage systems.

Regardless, we as Intercel are caught up in the energy transition and with it the transition to a sustainable future. This makes us even more aware that we must make choices responsibly and that a long-term sustainability strategy is important. Only in this way can we safeguard not only our own but also the needs of future generations.

Sustainability so far

Battery technologies

With commitment to a sustainable future, it is important that we identify the complete life cycle of our products as best we can and make them sustainable wherever possible.

The beginning of our products’ life cycles begins with the gathering of raw materials and the making of battery cells. Although this life stage is outside the direct scope of Intercel ‘s business processes, we can influence this life stage by making the right choices. In the battery industry, LFP (main raw materials: lithium, iron and phosphate) and NMC (main raw materials: nickel, manganese and cobalt) are two common lithium battery technologies. The extraction of cobalt is often done in unethical ways. In addition, the service life of LFP battery cells is much longer. Consequently, we use almost only LFP battery cells in the lithium batteries and energy solutions we supply. We are also trying to offer a more sustainable range of our lead batteries. The Lead Carbon batteries are a good example of this due to their extended service life.

Sustainability within Intercel ‘s business processes

In addition to choosing certain battery technologies, we at Intercel have an impact on the environment through the design of our business processes. Our energy consumption plays an important role in this. We have made this more sustainable by installing solar panels on our business premises, using an energy storage system at the new production center and installing a heat pump. Half of our premises are already off gas. We are also trying to make transport associated with our business processes as sustainable as possible. For example, we limit air travel and most of our vehicle fleet is electric.

The “end” of life cycles

Doing business in a sustainable way also means that as a company we take responsibility for the products we supply and think about what happens to them at the end of their useful life. Intercel is affiliated with Stichting Open (formerly Stibat), which, among other things, promotes the integrality of the recycling process. Lead batteries can be recycled; up to 99% of the materials can be recovered in this process. With lithium batteries, however, this percentage is lower and, for the time being, a lot of energy is lost due to the high temperatures required to recycle the cells. It is therefore interesting to investigate how these cells can be more highly recycled.

A sustainable future

When it comes to sustainability, there is always room for improvement. That is why we are far from finished with sustainability. For example, we also want to:

• Do a life cycle analysis of a cradle-to-cradle battery. Based on this, Intercel can determine where further sustainability can take place. (2024).
• Making our new production center (to be built in Haarlem, planned time of completion: Q2 2025) even more sustainable (looking at BREEAM, GPR, among others).
• Electric commercial vehicles (when available for heavy loads).
• Even better map the ESG values of all our suppliers (2025).
• All commercial buildings off gas (2026).

In addition, we will investigate what Intercel can do with the batteries that will be returned from excavators, light-EVs, etc. in a few years. Possibly these can be reused in energy storage systems, for example. However, due to the long service life of the LFP cells, the batteries we supplied are still in use.

Finally, there is only one sustainable business choice that we have made the most impact with and that is our contribution to the energy transition! For 6 years we have been committed to making the energy grid, heavy construction equipment, aerial work platforms, light-EV and more sustainable. We have already been able to make a lot of impact with this and we are very proud of that.