Design and material crucial for battery recycling and reuse

Battery recycling is extremely important to make e-mobility truly sustainable. Battery packs need to be recycled to make sure that the valuable materials inside—such as nickel, cobalt, graphite, and lithium—stay within the material loop. But the current situation is complex.

Although battery producers are ramping up capacity to meet rising demand coming from the automotive industry, there is little infrastructure in place to support battery recycling. That’s according to Philipp tho-Pesch, battery recycling expert at Henkel. “Given an average battery lifetime of eight to 15 years, the vast number of batteries will not reach end of life before 2030,” he says. “Therefore, the batteries recycled today are mainly from crashed vehicles, development, and production scrap together with small amounts of end-of-life batteries. Overall, the infrastructure and logistics are yet to be established as volumes are not existent today.”