- “Green” mobility?: The sustainability of battery electric vehicles is still in question due to the lack of material cycles, especially in battery manufacturing.
- New EC Battery directive: has several targets, including higher
- recycling rates,
- material recovery rates - especially of cobalt, nickel, lithium and copper -,
- quality of the secondary raw materials to enable "closed-loop recycling“, and
- share of secondary raw materials in new lithium batteries (>10% lithium and >20% cobalt in 2035).
- Rising material costs, e.g. those of lithium, which doubled within 6 years.
- Design-for-disassembly?: Current battery design is primarily focused on cost minimization in production but hardly on reuse or recycling.
- Growth-market: The projected demand for battery cells for BEVs to be produced in Europe by 2040 is five times higher than the current production volume in Europe.
- Limited quality secondary materials: In practice, there are therefore three main recycling approaches:
- pyrometallurgical recycling,
- hydrometallurgical recycling and
- direct (mechanical) recycling, where mechanical recycling in particular offers a high potential to generate a high-quality and recyclable material flow, preferable to greenhouse gas-emitting pyrometallurgical or wastewater and slag-intensive hydrometallurgical processes.
- Significant opportunities to reduce the environmental footprint remain untapped.