Q&A: Driving forward the battery recycling revolution

Recycling is increasingly regarded as the new frontier in the battery revolution — crucial to filling future metal supply gaps, to reducing the environmental footprint associated with electric vehicles (EVs), and to the energy transition more widely. As companies and regulators get to grips with the numerous challenges involved in building the infrastructure for commercial scale battery recycling, it remains to be seen how processes will evolve and what the future holds for battery scrap materials as commodities. Argus spoke with France's Veolia head of EV battery recycling, Emeric Malefant, about some of the key developments and opportunities in battery recycling.

How do you secure black mass and spent battery materials and how do you work out the component value of it? We are working closely with our partners to close the loop in their supply chain, to comply with future regulations and to develop a secure and local supply of raw materials.

We have developed specific end-of-life battery management services to help our customers solve some of their key challenges — jointly developing pre-recycling services, such as battery reuse or eco-design, complying with changing regulations that will require high recycling rates and the inclusion of recycled content in the production of new batteries in Europe by 2030, increasing self-sufficiency and autonomy by strengthening the circularity of strategic metals, and leveraging our 50 years of experience in hazardous waste management and more than 10 years in battery recycling to develop and operate specific processes that ensure operator safety.

Currently, we mostly work directly with battery waste, whether it is production waste from gigafactories or end-of-life batteries from OEMs. We may also process black mass from third parties in the near future. This is possible thanks to all the types of battery technologies available on the market, and thanks to Veolia's expertise and know-how on the whole recycling process — first of all on the mechanical processes of discharge, disassembly and crushing until the black mass is extracted, then on the chemical processes hydrometallurgical, for the extraction and purification of metals from the black mass. Finally, we are working with our partners to adapt our products so that they can be reintegrated into the production process of new batteries. For this last step, we can count on our partner Solvay.

Are there any specific metals that are more difficult to extract? We currently recycle plastics, iron, aluminium and copper in the first phase of recycling. We then recover mainly copper, nickel and cobalt in the hydrometallurgical process. Lithium is a little more difficult to treat and we are currently finalising our process to include it in our large-scale purification operations.

We have several research and development programmes under way to further improve the efficiency of our processes and we are constantly looking to increase the list of recycled materials. The HPD technology developed by one of our business units is currently used for our own operation and also by some of our competitors.

To what extent is battery recycling key to the electric vehicle revolution? Battery recycling is essential for three main reasons. Firstly, batteries are one of the major contributors to the environmental footprint of EVs. Recycling is a key benefit to drastically reducing this footprint and reaping the full benefits of decarbonising electric mobility.

In the long-term, resource supply may become an issue in some territories, depending on geopolitical fluctuations. Developing recycling programmes can reduce our dependence by increasing self-sufficiency in strategic metals such as lithium, nickel and cobalt.

Finally, batteries can be a threat to the environment and the people who handle them, as they contain chemicals and are highly flammable. Proper management of their recycling is therefore mandatory to avoid accidents and mitigate any form of risk.

How are plans progressing at Veolia's new UK facility in Minworth? Everything is moving quite fast. We have just received the final approvals and the site should start to receive batteries by the end of the year. At first, only the discharge and disassembly will be done on site before sending the batteries to France for further operations — black mass extraction and hydrometallurgy. But soon a large part of the process will be managed locally.

Do you see any regulatory challenges on the horizon with regard to your recycling processes and handling of recycled materials or chemicals? How do you solve those problems? Battery recycling is a market driven by regulation. From Veolia's point of view, the planned evolution of regulations by strengthening the required recycling rates pushes the whole industry towards better performance. The mandatory inclusion of metals from recycling in the manufacture of new batteries is also a strong signal to the market, as it will bring profound changes in the value chain by imposing circularity. The challenge is to be ambitious on these different criteria, but not to go too fast. This would risk limiting the possibilities for innovation to a few technologies, or forcing all batteries to be recycled, with no second life or reuse circuits.

A lot of batteries and electronics products have historically been designed without recyclability in mind. What role does design need to play in scaling up the battery recycling industry? Design for circularity is really a hot topic and we are starting to see a growing interest from our partners to include recyclability in the design of their products.

It's critical that all stakeholders understand that the easier a product is to recycle, the more value we can extract from our recycling operations and the more the entire value chain will benefit from it, either by reducing the cost of end-of-life management operations or by producing better recycled materials. Sometimes it is possible to achieve big benefits with small improvements. But to do that we need to create links and communication channels between both ends of the value chain.

The outstanding question to convince a wider audience of eco-design is then to find an appropriate way to share the value generated by circularity efforts — on recycling and reuse — between all actors, especially if you are not working in a closed loop and the actors who benefit from second life and recycling are different from those who build the products in the beginning.

Could a spot market develop for trading recycled battery material? This is a possibility and, as business models evolve very quickly, it is difficult to say what tomorrow will bring. The current trend, however, is to retain traceability and ownership of strategic metals to avoid exposure to price volatility and supply disruption risks.

Could recycled raw materials — such as black mass, for example — ever become commodities? I think it would mean that we have done a good job if recycling becomes the norm and using virgin metals the exception. There is still a long way to go and we will have to wait until the transition to electric mobility is complete. If we can get the right closed-loop supply chain in place, mining may only become necessary to overcome the annual market growth and the few percent lost in the recycling processes.

By Ellie Saklatvala

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