Battery Recycling

This presentation will provide an overview of black mass supply chains and the evolving market forces shaping the battery recycling sector. It will cover how shifting US policy, overseas demand, battery metals prices, and changing trade flows are influencing black mass sourcing, pricing, and processing. The discussion will explore the current drivers both supporting market growth and hindering North American expansion and what global developments mean for the US market.

Though there have been many prior assessments of the economics and CO2-equivalent emissions impacts of lithium-ion battery (LIB) recycling, it remains unclear how these metrics translate to the need for policy intervention, or lack thereof, in the industry. In this work, we compare LIB recycling profitability and monetized CO2-equivalent emissions externalities across a wide range of scenarios and assumptions to determine under what conditions policy intervention may be justified.

This presentation outlines how GM is advancing EV battery circularity across the full lifecycle through serviceability, remanufacturing, recycling, second use, and design-for-lifecycle.

Since its founding, Tesla has pursued a north star of unconstrained sustainability without compromise. While our Master Plans have evolved—from the high-performance Roadster to a comprehensive vision of amazing abundance powered by AI and humanoid robots—one foundational element has matured consistently alongside them: Tesla's Vertically-Integrated Battery Recycling Program.This program transforms what could have been a critical constraint (material scarcity for batteries, solar, and storage) into a virtuous cycle of abundance. By designing for circularity from the cell level, producing at Gigafactories with on-site recycling capabilities, and recovering high-value materials through advanced metallurgical processes, Tesla closes the loop on lithium, nickel, cobalt, copper, and other critical materials.

Introducing a proprietary hydrometallurgical recycling platform capable of processing both NMC and LFP black mass within a unified flowsheet characterized by extremely fast reactivity in all unit operations. Unlike conventional routes, the process selectively dissolves target metals while leaving most impurities in the solid residue, eliminating solvent extraction, reducing downstream purification, and enabling direct recovery of battery-grade products. Notably the process does not produce sodium sulfate but only salable products.

Direct cathode recycling enables recovery of end-of-life lithium-ion batteries while preserving the structural integrity of cathode materials. Demonstrated here is a novel, scalable separation technique that has the potential to produce high-purity cathodes with performance metrics comparable to commercial materials. It is crucial that these recovered cathodes meet next-gen EV targets. Cathode upcycling improves energy density, reduces reliance on raw material mining, and supports a circular supply chain.