Battery Recycling Summit 2023: A market that’s hard to define

Multinational corporations and startups alike have been investing to handle an expected stream of end-of-life electric vehicle (EV) batteries to process for materials recycling. Some of that spending might be premature, according to a presenter at the Asia INTL Li-ion Battery Recycling Summit 2023, held in Singapore in early December.

“The recycling market is and will remain in undersupply,” said Hans Eric Melin, managing director of Germany-based Circular Energy Storage Research and Consulting.

That circumstance is especially true in Europe and North America, where Melin said the volumes are not really coming along. The consultant cites incorrect assumptions about what percentage of EV batteries produced in a given year will be introduced into a recycling facility seven or even 10 years later.

EV batteries are lasting a lot longer than their warranty periods, Melin said. They are designed that way, he said, because EV producers do not want to pay for a second battery, as this likely would wipe out any profit they made on the original sale of the car.

Another presenter, Ashkay Prasad of consulting firm Arthur D. Little, said the battery typically comprises 35 percent of the cost of an EV, versus 16 percent for the powertrain of a typical internal combustion engine, or ICE, vehicle.

Additionally, repurposing older EV batteries has become the default option for damaged vehicles. Some of the earliest EV batteries are still in use in industrial or storage applications, said the consultant, or even powering an older, second-hand vehicle. Even EV batteries at 30 percent of their original power can still be used, Melin said.

Finally, the export of second-hand EVs is following a similar pattern with routes customarily taken by older ICE vehicles. Exports of older EVs are happening not just in Europe, but also in China. End-of-life EV owners there are finding they can get a better price by exporting an older model to destinations like Kazakhstan or Jordan compared with having the vehicle dismantled in China.

Even by 2030, with more ELVs on the road globally, Melin predicts the genuine retirement rate of EVs and their batteries may be only about 10 percent of new EV battery production that year. “For a long time, recycling will not be that important to what is being produced,” he said of the EV battery metals market.

While EV batteries may be on a slow ride to having their metals harvested, they are not in the meantime threatened with being landfilled, said another presenter at the summit. That notion seems to have caught hold with some members of the public.

After reviewing the considerable investments being made globally in EV battery recycling capacity, Michelle Lynch, CEO of United Kingdom-based research and consulting firm Enabled Future Ltd., said, “The idea that we won’t be able to recycle batteries by 2030 is just not true.”

Both Melin and Lynch said market-driven decisions to repurpose older EV batteries will likely continue to be made, with Lynch also urging regulators to support right-to-repair and disassembly activities. “We shouldn’t need legislators to step in” she said, adding that not even product and battery producers are well served by making batteries that are hard to disassemble.

Even with that barrier sometimes in place, Melin said owners of older batteries are capably surveying the repurposing versus reuse landscape. “If you look at the black mass [recycled-content battery material] price, it is much, much lower than what [a recycler] would get for reuse," he said.

The Asia INTL Li-ion Battery Recycling Summit 2023 was organized by Shanghai-based Global Decision Maker Management Consulting Ltd. and took place at the Crowne Plaza Changi Airport in Singapore in early December.