The 5% rate and other untruths about battery recycling

A few days before Christmas Michael Liebreich , CEO of Liebreich Associates, posted on X (formerly known as Twitter) about batteries:

“Batteries are often described as resource-intensive. With a 95% proven recycling rate and a 10yr life, over 50% of battery minerals mined today will still be in use in 130 years. Add 5% performance improvement per cycle, and they will be delivering services forever. Boom!

The point was that batteries are in fact very resource efficient – especially compared to the fossil fuels. Let’s embrace that and invest heavily. It will only be better from here.

If there was anything that required more energy at that moment it was the servers in X data centers. Within a few hours there were some 150 comments and over 1,000 repostings. Being the founder of what is today BloombergNEF, and never afraid of causing a stir in the public opinion, Michael has more than 65,000 followers on X. A lot of fans but also a lot of people who can’t wait to show how wrong he is.

And if there is something people have opinions about, and as it appears, have a lot of data to share on, it’s battery recycling. Batteries seems in many peoples’ minds to be something of the most polluting and resource inefficient technology human kind has ever invented, made to finally leak toxic chemicals in a landfill near you. Together with the batteries’ CO2 footprint caused by energy intensive production and child labour used in the mining of cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo, battery recycling, or rather the lack of it has always been the “dark side” or the “dirty secret” of the EV.

One of the most common and actually well “documented” “facts” is that only 5% of lithium-ion batteries are recycled or even worse that 95% of the batteries are going to landfill.

For anyone who knows only a little about recycling and batteries it’s easy to understand that this is far from correct.

In Europe, where about 25% of all lithium-ion batteries historically have been sold, batteries that can easily be removed from devices usually have a high collection rate and e-waste companies must remove and separate batteries from the devices they are collecting. These batteries contain up to 20% cobalt which is a valuable metal currently trading at $28,000 per tonne which is more than three times more valuable than copper and 14 times more valuable than lead. In the hands of scrap companies and metal processors no one will obviously miss the chance to recover this.

Industrial batteries (including EV batteries) are completely banned from landfill in Europe and as they in the US are classified as universal waste, which means that they should be handed over to a processor of hazardous waste, the same thing basically applies there.

In China the cobalt-containing battery cells we usually have in our phones, so called LCO batteries, currently trade for around $5,000/tonne and even LFP batteries, known in the market to not contain any valuable materials, trade at around $1,000 per tonne.

What’s a tonne of batteries? It’s about 3,000 laptop batteries. Or modules from three Tesla Model 3. Yes, you may have to work a lot providing service to thousands of people but it’s certainly better than collecting paper or plastics. And luckily we have e-waste and car salvage companies that are well organised to do it.

Still people believe that these batteries are disposed of in a landfill. This when the incentives to collect lithium-ion batteries are in fact very strong in most markets:

You can make a lot of money and you don’t go to jail.

But what happens if we ask ChatGPT how much of lithium-ion batteries are recycled. This is the answer I get:

The reason why ChatGPT gives this answer is that there seems to be a strong support for this out there. Go to almost any recycling startup’s website or check their pitch decks. The number will be there. Ask the US Department of Energy. They used it to push their initial program for EV battery recycling. Ask hundreds, maybe thousands of researchers who have published paper on battery recycling. They stand by that number.

The origin and the widespread adoption of the 5% rate

Over the years I have written a lot about the origin of the 5% recycling rate which goes back to two publications where none of the statements in fact supports the rate. At lest not in the way it later has been used.

The first version originates from a press release in 2011 from EBRA, the European Battery Recycling Association, as it’s interpreted in a 2016 report from Friends of the Earth.

The original press release is here (thanks @Agustín Blanco and Michael Liebreich for retrieving it!)

In a way this number is correct, although it's the collection rate, not the recycling rate. Based on the EU Battery Directive’s formula for fulfilment of the union's collection target the amount of batteries collected in 2010 was about 5% of the average of what had been placed on the market the previous three years. That doesn’t however say anything about whether the batteries that has not been collected would be recycled or not. It exclusively said how much EBRA's members and affilates had been collected that year.

As most of you may know lithium-ion batteries even in portable devices usually last much longer than three years (I blush when I admit that I have charged my five year old DeWalt less than five times).

Also, lithium-ion batteries nowadays are usually built into the devices they power such as smartphones, ultralight laptops and tablets. That means they share the destiny with these devices and unlike alkaline, primary lithium and portable nickel metal hydride and nickel cadmium batteries they have a very low (usually only 10%-15%) collection rate through the traditional collection organisations.

In fact this is the very reason why only small numbers of lithium-ion batteries have been recycled in Europe and North America. Batteries go with their devices to other countries where they are reused, remanfactured and resold. When they eventually reach end of life it will not be in the markets where they originally were sold. Hence it's impossible to get to a 100% collection rate based on POM (placed/put on the market) unless the particular chemistry has a negative growth such as nickel cadmium.

The second version is completely false. Originating from the paper Current and Prospective Li-Ion Battery Recycling and Recovery Processes by Heelan et al from 2016 the number of 95% of lithium-ion batteries going to landfill is found in the abstract but cannot be retrieved in the actual paper.

In fact the closest number the authors present is a collection rate of 9% in Europe, which is described as bad, but still would be almost 100% better than what they evenually claim. More importantly, to claim that batteries end up somewhere (landfill) only because they can’t be found where you expect to find them is just wrong, I’m sorry but if you want to know what’s in a landfill you have to check….the landfill.

I first brought up the incorrect and incomplete research, intepretations and citations in the preface of the report from 2019 “State of the art in reuse and recycling of lithium-ion batteries – A research review”, encouraged by Greger Ledung at the Swedish Energy Agency who commissioned the work.

Today the report is cited by 107 other research papers but not necessarily for what I wrote in the preface obviously.

I have used Circular Energy Storage Research and Consulting’s own reports to try to explain, discussed with researchers and authorities, brought it up in presentations in conferences and not least through social media where I have some wonderful followers who help me to set the record straight when the alarmists sound. Among my favourite research contacts I count Gavin Harper, Linda Gaines and Oliver Heidrich, who not only are some of the best and most reputable reserchers in the field but also strongly contributed with their own works to provide a better understanding about the state of recycling.

It hasn't helped much though. The number keeps coming up. And there are two things that fascinates me.

The first thing (which also is highlighted in the flow chart above) is that the numbers are rejuvenated and enhanced over time by added words and expressions like “currently”, “global”, “more than” (when talking about landfill) or “less than” (when talking about recycling rate). The words are casually thrown into the text and suddenly the recycling rate both moves in time by more than 10 years and also gets worse. Because both numbers could be dated to around 2010 and none of them are claimed to be global in the original sources. Neither did it say "less than" 5% or "more than" 95%.

Still that happens almost by itself. Like in Sheth et al, in The Lithium-Ion Battery Recycling Process from a Circular Economy Perspective—A Review and Future Directions from 2023.

“Globally, less than 5% of LIBs are recycled, while in India alone, over 50,000 tons of LIB waste is generated annually [5,6]. Some unrecycled batteries may be used in second-life applications such as energy storage systems. Still, most unrecycled batteries generally end up in landfills, contaminating the land and groundwater reserves.”

That batteries in a landfill would contaminate groundwater reserves is in itself a remarkable claim as landfilling after all is a controlled waste management treatment method aimed at making sure no contamination is happening. It is sometimes difficult for people to separate landfill from dumping but the difference is luckily huge. Just check in countries like the United States, UK or Hong Kong.

Even ChatGPT seemed embarrassed over the fact that its latest check was from 2022 and wanted to point out that things might have happened since then. A sign perhaps that AI after all is more intelligent but is still limited to what humans have produced. In the research community the numbers instead get eternal life.

The second thing is that even if the authors in rare cases find contrasting data they seem obliged to refer to previous numbers even if they might understand that they are incorrect. Instead the numbers are used and presented just like different findings.

Like in Zorin et al, Acid-Assisted Separation of Cathodic Material from Spent Electric Vehicle Batteries for Recycling, also from 2023:

“There are contradicting reports on the current state of recycling of LiBs ranging from 95% going to landfill [5] to almost a 60% recycling rate [6]; this, however, poorly contrasts with what can be achieved when the correct legislation is in place, as witnessed for lead-acid batteries [7]."

Again we see that the claim of 95% landfill rate is referred as a “current state” although it’s from a paper (Heelan et al) written in 2016 using five to seven year old data. However now it has moved to 2023. The “contradicting” number refers to a paper by Pagliaro and Meneguzzo from 2019 in which they are referring a LinkedIn article by myself. And being the author (unfortunately I fail to find which the original post is) I can only say that the number is not interpreted entirely correct. The 60% refers to the amount of batteries available for recycling compared to how much that reached end of life. It says nothing about how much of the end-of-life batteries that eventually will be recycled.

What fascinates me though is that despite that it is possible to check and find that the claims are baseless, researchers chose to include them. In this case, where the research results in fact has nothing to do with recycling rate, it maybe would have been better to just not mention it at all.

The real recycling rate and the damage of untruths in research

OK, so fair enough, but why is this even important? If researchers needs a number to set the scene for the research, is that so bad? That some recycling startups make their pitch a bit more interesting, isn’t that what we all do when we want to market our products, companies or ourselves? VCs and private equity companies know this already, don’t they?

Before I answer that I will just try to answer another question you might have if you have joined me this far: how much of the lithium-ion batteries are actually recycled?

In Tracking Flows of End-of-Life Battery Materials and Manufacturing Scrap from 2023 by Linda Gaines, Jingyi Zhang , Xin He, Jessey Bouchard and myself we estimate that 59% of the batteries that were available for recycling were recycled. The basis of the work which was financed by aramco is data from Circular Energy Storage Research and Consulting which then has been used in scenarios by the Argonne National Laboratory. Important to note is that we don’t say where the remaining 41% were, just because we just don’t know.

It is very important though to make a clear distincition between different kind of recycling rates and the difference between what we can verify and fionally what is a likely number today and in the future. As a response to the emotional X conversation that Michael Liebreich started I offered some explanations in a thread to why I think recycling rates actually are close to 90% or even higher.

So back to why I think the 5% recycling rate is damaging.

First of all it actually provides high octane fuel for all sceptics to electric vehicles as well as any organisation that would prefer a slower growth for EVs and batteries. I am not saying that we should avoid the critical questions about electrified transport, just that it should be based on real facts. In this case it’s not.

The meagre 5% recycling rate has been powerful munition for the oil and gas industry, parts of the automotive industry as well as for lead-acid, flow battery manufacturers and fuel cell proponents. I am sure it has contributed to serious delay in both people’s adoption of EVs and in development of policies supporting EVs.

Secondly there is a risk our society doesn’t get it priorities right. Below is a chart from Circular Energy Storage’s latest update on recycling capacity compared with our forecast for material available for recycling from our data platform CES Online.

It’s a massive gap caused by billions of dollars entering the market, both from private and public sources. Especially in the West the narrative has been that the main reason for lack of recycling has been lack of technology, something that has motivated funding of both technology development and capacity build-out in a rapid pace. And as countries and provinces don’t look at eachother but rather only want to see jobs secured in their own jurisdiction we get a compounding effect of capacity when country after country, province after province or even county after county want to see their recycling plants and their 100-1000 jobs per plant.

It has also contributed to legislative actions like the EU Battery Regulation which as an incentive for a perceived underdeveloped recycling sector mandates cell makers to have a certain recycled content in batteries. In a rapidly growing market this is quite controversial. First of all because there is at least a theoretical risk that recycling this way could have higher priority than reuse, despite the fact that reuse is placed higher in the waste hierachy. Ironically it is also something that put Chinese and South Korean material makers in better position than their European counterparts as they have much better access larger amounts of recyclables. Why? Because they are the two most important battery and battery material producing countries in the world giving recyclers both access to large amount of production scrap and good-paying downstream buyers for the recycled material. Our initiative to explain this on a wider scale is found in this Science article: Melin et al 2021 – Global implications of the EU battery regulation

While an oversized capacity isn’t necessarily something bad for the market at large we will see examples of public funding going down the drain and we might also see failures from companies that just try to grow too fast or too big and eventually don’t get anywhere. With overcapacity comes lower margins. With lower volumes comes a stronger need for working capital which adds to the already ambitious capital expenditures that recycling companies plan for.

Thirdly. Personally I know the battery recycling market very well. I follow it on a daily basis and have done so for more than 15 years. But I don’t know so much about nano technology, about medicine, nutrition or climate. If the research is so wrong in my area, how is it in the areas I don’t know anything about?

We deserve a research we can trust, that take the society forward and help us expand our horizons. It can’t only be about writing papers which support the own research field or serve as a way to attract more funding for doing the same thing, over and over again. If we can’t trust research – who should we then trust?

Other myths, misunderstandings overinterpretations in battery reuse and recycling

Also. It’s actually not only about the 5% recycling rate. Related to it there are also a number of other “truths” which are often referred in research with highly limited evidence:

The first one is that batteries in electric vehicles reach end of life after 8-10 years – In fact there is almost no evidence for this except that many battery warranties are eight years. Instead we have data showing that EVs will remain on the road for more than 15 years even if the battery is far from perfect. In fact we are only two years from being right as we follow the stock of EVs from 2010 very closely.

Again the effect is that forecasts for recycled materials far too often are too high, leading to even bigger capacity/supply gap. The difference in need for working capital over five or even ten additional years is massive.

Another casual "truth" is that batteries which reach 80% state of health will be removed from their vehicles. That is just not how it works. Who would pay for that? Who says 80% is not good enough? Would people be forced to change battery? And isn't 80% of 75kWh more than 100% of 24 kWh?

Besides technical life time a battery lifecycle really is all about value. Value of the application and value of the battery. A vehicle will reach end of life when it’s not economical to repair it. A battery can remain in a vehicle even with 30% state of health, you just have to use it differently. This misunderstanding affects both reuse and recycling forecasts.

Another one. That batteries that are not recycled instead must have gone to waste – Most batteries are not available for recycling because they don’t remain in the market. Export of devices for reuse, as well as export of used EVs is a much bigger cause of low recycling volumes than batteries thrown in the waste. As discussed above this has always been the case for used electronics but really accelarated with the smartphone, tablet and ultralight tablets. Because the batteries are rarely replaced and the devices have high value on the global reuse market.

The same is true for electric vehicles which we have spent a lot of research on, showing that both end-of-life vehicles and older used EVs are exported to other markets incentivised by low custom tarifs and no VAT. This Wired article which I am happy to have contributed to tells this story maybe better than any other.

One very common perception is also that a battery that won’t be reused in an energy storage application then will be recycled instead – only because an ESS company prefered to use new batteries instead. That is like coming to a conclusion that there is no market for Louis Vuitton bags only because most people don't buy them.

Many times the reason why used EV batteries aren’t used in energy storage applications is not that they are worth to little but rather too much. Simply because there is a large number of different reuse applications, not least in vehicles, that generate more value than energy storage for the owners of the batteries. They will pay more for batteries and make it unsustainable for ESS companies to buy them.

One of the most damaging myths which I think finally now is fading away is that certain recycling technologies are completely novel and that the West is leading the way. Here I have been pointing out for years that recycling for sure can become better and more efficient but that recyclers in China and South Korea have been operating on industrial scale for more than a decade. They operate signficantly larger plants, have more expertise, mature technology, high level of automation and can pay more for material due to both higher efficency and better downstream markets.

Still a majority of research papers which describes the battery recycling area keep studying and referring 10-15 year old flow sheets of pre-treatment processes or even research projects in Europe and North America contributing to an image of an immature Western centric field in need of rapid research and development. This become especially apparent when there in extremely few cases are any references to recyclers in China or South Korea.

And right now the development is not only very fast in China and South Korea but also in Europe and North America. But the development is primarily happening in well funded companies which don't necesarily publish data in academic journals. This development needs at least to be discussed in research as papers otherwise only continue to describe technology from the early 2010s.

One more long-lived myths in the West is that lithium can’t be recycled – This is just not true. Lithium has not always been recycled. Due to a low market value for many years it was challenging for several recyclers but it was a matter of economics, not technical capability. Today lithium recovery is driving a large part of the industry and will determine where batteries will be processed. During the time when the lithium carbonate price was extremely high in 2021 and 2022 the recovery of lithium was key for recyclers to be able to get hold of waste batteries at all.

The recovery of lithium is also key to recycling of lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries and many of LFP batteries are in fact recycled by lithium companies. But if people believe lithium recovery does not happen or is unprofitable it leads us to the perception that LFP can't be recycled or that they are too uneconomical to recycle. Not even this is true, at least not in the the markets where LFP is dominant, that is in China. More on this here: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/hansericmelin_is-recycling-the-achilles-heel-of-lfp-batteries-activity-7151563863858028544-tfJJ?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

Lastly I am a bit concerned about the so commonly shared idea that pyrometallurgical processes categorically are inferior to mechanical pre-processing methods, both from a recovery and carbon footprint point of view. While it is true that a lot of the black mass in Europe, North America and Japan has been treated in processes where lithium hasn't been recovered there has been a lot of development among companies in the US, Europe and not least South Korea in this field.

A lot of the research reviews that include pyrometallurgical processes discuss the processes based on 20 years old patents and flowsheets. Our research of real recycling companies in the world shows that reductive processes in fact are up and coming and most likely might have as good CO2 footprint as many processes that use mechanical pre-processing. At least if the final usage of graphite and organics is taken into consideration.

Again, the fact that pyrometallurgical pre-treatment is more robust for different form factors and chemistries is almost casually described just like it's not important. But in markets where large amounts of batteries need to be consolidated from many sources it is important. I am not saying that pyrometallurgical treatment methods are superior. Just that any method should be analysed based on its individual merits, not what was done 20 years ago.

We will share more about this in our upcoming report on lithium-ion battery capacity which will be published the 15th February.

To summerize I come across all of these perceptions in both research and in presentations by companies with almost no data behind that back the actual conclusions. The common thread is a lack of understanding of how the market really works which leads to pure speculation. Just like it’s speculation to assume that if batteries are not collected for recycling they end up in a landfill.

One reason for this is that there is a lack of cross scientific research where expertise in metallurgy, chemistry and chemical engineering meets expertise in for instance business, behavioural science and geography.

As a member of the program committee in the Swedish Battery Fund through which we every year fund research in battery development and battery recycling in Sweden I have pushed for these kind of projects and have had great support from the rest of the committee. Still it has been difficult to attract high quality projects in these new areas.

I hope that we finally get there though. Because this big energy transition we currently are in, comes with gigantic challenges, not least geopolitically but also financially.

With those challenges I don’t think we can afford to navigate after maps which so badly represent the actual terrain. We need to raise the bar.