Tamworth man Chris Celovic won a Churchill Fellowship to find better ways to recycle batteries

Mr Celovic has gained extraordinary backing for his project, having received a prestigious Churchill Fellowship from the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust.

He said it's a huge achievement, which gives him the opportunity to take his work with recycling electric vehicle batteries to the next level.

"It is quite a competitive process with thousands of entries for projects," he said.

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"Not only do I get to do the project that I want to do, but I'm also now a Churchill Fellow, which is really something.

"The Churchill Fellowship allows you to do everything yourself. Looking at how you achieve the project, which meetings you'd like to have, and which countries you'd like to visit."

Mr Celovic's project looks at how late model batteries, such as those in electric vehicles, phones and various other items, can be recycled.

With his freedom to travel internationally, Mr Celovic said he wants to find out how Australia can stop throwing so many useful battery minerals into landfill.

"The process itself of recycling batteries is quite standard. It's happening around the world," he said.

"What I would like to do is look at the verticals either side of that.

"So how they get the batteries in the first place, what type types of processes and systems do they have for recycling those batteries ... and what happens after the minerals are extracted."

He's already got his eye on some international destinations, where he'll be able to take tips from organisations well ahead in the battery recycling game.

"Primarily in Europe, I would like to go and visit Volkswagen because they're building quite a large battery recycling facility in Berlin," he said.

"I would also like to go and visit Norway because they have 70 per cent market share of all the world's EV's [electric vehicles] up there.

"And they've done a deal with Glencore, the biggest mining company in the world, to recycle batteries."

The project came out of Mr Celovic's time working for the state government.

"I wrote the critical mineral strategy for the NSW government when I was director of Mining Industry Development," he said.

"And one thing I noticed was that there was a real necessity to be able to look at battery recycling and how that became an input into critical mineral storage in NSW."

Cobalt is one of the minerals which Mr Celovic said NSW would really benefit from extracting from batteries.

"Cobalt is shaping up as one of NSW's primary critical minerals," he said.

"We've got a couple of cobalt projects in NSW that I'll talk to and say there's an opportunity now."

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