Lithium Battery Recycling and Reuse May be Getting New Life
NAATBatt held its nineth annual Lithium Battery Recycling Lifecycle Management Workshop in Troy, Michigan on July 7-8. The program featured a variety of great speakers, including a panel talking about the recycling strategies of the major automotive OEM’s, a Leaders’ Roundtable about the future of the 2nd life battery market and innovative approaches to the recycling of LFP batteries. Attendees also heard informative presentations by Kyle Gordon of Roland Berger, Ken Hoffman of Traubenbach Associates and Hans Eric Melin of CES Research & Consulting, among others, about current market conditions and industry prospects.
There is no denying that this past year has been a difficult one for lithium battery recyclers in North America. The EV market is down about 25% year-over-year. Metals prices remain low and the pull signal from Asia for North American-generated black mass remains robust. Attendance at this year’s workshop was down about 20% from last year’s workshop, providing more evidence of the slow-down.
But for all the well-known difficulties, three factors may be converging to give this field new life:
The first factor is growing concern about supply chain security for strategic processed materials. At a time of geopolitical uncertainty, the United States’ near total reliance on foreign entities of concern to meet its battery materials needs is attracting attention at the highest levels of government. While the U.S. government is likely to pursue a number of solutions, one of the most certain and probably most effective will be to recover battery materials from recycling finished battery products already in the United States. This urban mining of battery materials may well prove to be cheaper and certainly much faster than permitting, financing and building more traditional mines and processing plants in the United States.
The second factor is the changing chemical properties of the batteries being recycled. When lithium batteries contain large quantities of nickel and cobalt, the principal challenge in the recycling business is how to acquire enough feedstock. As the principal chemistries of high-capacity batteries change to emphasize lower-value inputs, such as iron phosphate, silicon and even sodium, the principal challenge of battery recycling will become a technology challenge: how to turn these lower-cost recycled materials into new materials that industry can use and do so at a profit.
The third factor is the growing recognition of the robust nature of lithium batteries themselves. About two years ago, Professor Jeff Dahn of Dalhousie University started talking about the million-mile battery. Many in industry nodded their heads and rolled their eyes at Professor Dahn’s speculation. After all, what works in a lab does not always work in the real world. But there is a bit less eye rolling now. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the average EV battery retains 95% of its capacity after five years and that for EV’s built from 2022 on, the battery replacement rate has fallen to 0.3% from about 8.3% for models built from 2011 to 2016.
If the useful lives of lithium-ion batteries will consistently exceed the useful life of the vehicles in which they are initially installed there is a significant potential for industry disruption. If the platform that provides energy to a vehicle becomes independent of the vehicle, there could be significant implications for new business models, such as battery swapping and mobility-as-a-service. After all, auto wreckers do not typically crush used ICE vehicles while there is still gas in their tanks.
Each of these three factors leads me to believe that the recycling and lifecycle management industry will soon catch a second wind. In the meantime, those engaged in that industry should watch new emerging technologies and business models carefully. And there is no better place to see those things than at NAATBatt.
NAATBatt members who are interested in seeing the materials presented at the workshop should go to: https://www.naatbatt.org/2026-recycling-and-lifecycle-management-workshop. For those who are not yet members, join soon to get full access.