North America’s current capacity to process 144,000 tons per year of lithium-ion batteries is “quite insignificant” against the projected growth in new manufacturing, according to a recent overview of the global lithium-ion battery recycling landscape from consulting and research firm Deloitte and a division of the American Chemical Society.
However, the report found the U.S. “has initiatives underway to expand their current recycling capacity by more than 300,000 tons per year, involving both the improvement of existing facilities and the development of new ones.”
The report, titled “Lithium-ion battery recycling market and innovation: Trends for a green future,” outlines which processing methods are most commonly used to recycle batteries found in consumer electronics. It comes as the authors project an upcoming spike in batteries entering the waste stream, driven by electric vehicles.
U.S. capacity is well below China’s 1.1 million tons per year, Deloitte found, and China has plans to expand that capacity by 1.2 million tons each year moving forward.
The report framed the need for battery processing capacity expansion with some urgency, given the timing of wider-spread electric vehicle adoption.
“Since the performance of the lithium battery will gradually deteriorate with the increase of use time, the average service life of EV batteries ranges from 5 to 8 years,” the authors wrote. “Therefore, the first batch of EV batteries put into the market are ushering in a ‘retirement tide.'”
The report offered some technical specifics about battery chemistries and their typical recycling methods. For consumer electronics, lithium cobalt oxide and lithium manganese oxide are the most common battery chemistries. These are most frequently processed through hydrometallurgy, which is a chemical leaching process, or through smelting or a combination of the two.
A third method, which the report labeled “direct recycling,” involves mechanically dismantling batteries to recover the cathode without using acids or smelting. It’s less commonly used for consumer electronics batteries and lithium-ion battery applications despite having what the report identifies as the lowest environmental impact. In the U.S., emerging battery processor Princeton NuEnergy is an example of a company using this “cathode-to-cathode” technology.
Tracking government actions
The report, completed by the China office of Deloitte, found that China has also been particularly proactive on lithium-ion battery regulation. The country was engaged in lithium-ion battery end-of-life policymaking as far back as 2016, while U.S. EPA activity ramped up around 2021. China’s interest in promoting battery recycling was concurrent with wide-ranging solid waste reforms, which included a ban on imports of many recyclables and culminated in 2020.
There remains no U.S. federal policy covering lithium-ion battery waste management, but the EPA in a comprehensive 2021 report outlined the scale of battery-related fires in recycling facilities across the U.S., including in e-scrap facilities. In 2022, the U.S. government began funding battery recycling efforts across the country through the Inflation Reduction Act, legislation that established grants for clean energy and related projects.
In 2023, the EPA revisited the battery issue through a series of recommendations including that lithium-ion batteries be handled as hazardous waste, but did not go as far as changing regulations. And since then, the agency has convened a series of cross-industry working groups aimed at improving collection and labeling of lithium-ion batteries of all sizes.
