The next big battery material squeeze is old batteries.
A global rush into battery recycling is good news for automakers worried about future raw material supplies. But the wave of new factories poses a big risk for the recycling industry itself: there’s nowhere near enough scrap yet to feed them all.
For automakers in Europe, there’s an urgent need to build the plants ahead of regulations that will force them to use more recycled materials in their batteries from 2030 onwards. Independent recyclers also need to move quickly, and recovering the raw materials contained in the batteries could still prove lucrative for those who can lock in sufficient supplies. But the result is that the burgeoning industry is collectively building plants far too quickly.
In 2025, 78% of the available scrap supply will be coming from manufacturing waste, while end-of-life batteries will account for 22%, according to new research by Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. It won’t be until the mid-to-late 2030s that the industry reaches an inflection point where volumes of used batteries available to recyclers start to surge, the consultancy predicts.
To recycle spent batteries, they are first dismantled and shredded into something called “black mass,” which is then processed to produce specialist chemicals for use in new batteries. Glencore invested in Li-Cycle because it sees strong long-term prospects, but expects the next few years will be difficult for the sector broadly, said Kunal Sinha, Glencore’s global head of recycling.
Others are already adopting a hybrid approach, with rival recycler Redwood Materials announcing plans for a $3.5 billion battery-chemicals plant in Nevada that will be fed with a combination of mined and recycled raw materials.Even when vehicles are scrapped, the batteries are often snapped up by buyers willing to pay thousands of dollars to reuse them in other vehicles or in less-demanding applications like energy-storage systems.
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