50 Investible Opportunities for a New Nature Economy 2026

Range of financing mechanisms to support different players within ecosystem opportunities (continued)BOX 6 Banks can finance established corporates through commercial or sustainability-linked loans or bonds, used to finance facility construction and growth. As such, lending to battery recycling companies is comparable to conventional infrastructure financing. Venture capital and private equity investors can fund early-stage companies that innovate in the battery recycling value chain. Scaling up these innovations, particularly in hydrometallurgical recycling and battery dismantling, is crucial. For instance, tozero has developed a process to recover critical raw materials from any lithium-ion battery, regardless of design and from any resulting black mass (the byproduct of mechanical shredding or pyro-metallurgy, irrespective of its composition). Applying innovations like this more broadly could significantly reduce the burden along the supply chain to sort batteries, improving scalability. Given the complex, multi-stakeholder nature of these opportunities, financial and policy support should be designed to enable mechanisms that address collaboration, risk-sharing and systemic coordination across the ecosystem. Some practical examples of these include: –Logistics infrastructure to support consistent feedstock flows. Some design choices to support bankability include clients served per geographic area and standardization of intakes and contracts across different purchasers. –Shared infrastructure to build common assets, such as sorting and pre-processing facilities and data platforms, which individual actors may not be able to justify alone. 33 50 Investible Opportunities for a New Nature Economy