8 May 2026
DEScycle has won the Knorr-Bremse AG Circular Technology Award
DEScycle has won the Knorr-Bremse AG Circular Technology Award at IFAT Munich 2026! Europe’s largest awards for circular technology innovation, in collaboration with CIRCULAR REPUBLIC.
Selected from 50+ companies alongside some of the most advanced industrial technology startups in Europe, DEScycle was recognised in the Critical Raw Material Recovery category for our ionometallurgy platform recovering metals from waste.
This recognition reinforces what is becoming increasingly clear across industry and capital markets. Critical raw material supply is now a strategic infrastructure challenge. Electrification, AI, defence, and the energy transition are accelerating demand for copper, gold, silver and critical metals, while existing smelting infrastructure remains centralised, capital-intensive, slow to scale, and geopolitically concentrated.
DEScycle is building a different model.
Our distributed, modular metals processing platform enables high-efficiency recovery of critical metals directly from domestic waste streams, with significantly lower emissions and faster deployment economics than traditional routes.
We believe the next generation of metals supply will be:
→ Distributed rather than centralised
→ Modular rather than mega-project based
→ Sovereign and traceable rather than globally dependent
The award includes support for industrial proof-of-concept deployment alongside Knorr-Bremse AG and the Heinz Hermann Thiele Family Foundation an important step toward translating next-generation metals processing into scalable industrial infrastructure.
Congratulations to the other winners:
And thank you to Knorr-Bremse AG, the Heinz Hermann Thiele Family Foundation, CIRCULAR REPUBLIC and IFAT worldwide for backing technologies shaping the future of industrial resource resilience.