EVs, battery waste and million-dollar opportunity!

The number of lithium-ion batteries available in the global market will be multiplying leaps and bounds with electric mobility gaining traction which raises a pertinent question of battery waste disposal. Lithium-ion batteries in a waste stream are very dangerous and can lead to serious environmental implications.

Additionally, precious metals comprising these batteries would be lost forever. Therefore, managing this lithium-ion battery waste through recycling is a necessity.

EV batteries are not yet recycled anywhere at scale. Industrial recycling of lithium-ion batteries is done mainly in the European Union and China. The market is still in its infancy and battery lifetimes which is something around 10-12 years need to be exhausted first.

According to JMK Research estimates, the lithium-ion battery market in India is expected to increase from 2.9 GWh in 2018 to about 132 GWh by 2030 at a CAGR of 35.5 percent. The increasing volume of lithium-ion batteries, would in turn lead to a growing capacity of ‘spent’ batteries in the ecosystem. The annual recycling market is expected to be around 22 - 23 GWh, which is a $1,000 million opportunity.

The research estimates that the recycling market in India will start picking up from the year 2022 onwards when batteries presently in use in electric vehicles would reach their end of life.

The heavy reliance on imports of battery metals is one of the main reasons why India is still not a scale manufacturer of lithium-ion batteries. To bring down the imports and make battery manufacturing sustainable it is necessary to invest early in large scale recycling infrastructure.

Further, the changing international and political relations with countries owning natural reserves of these key metals and raw materials and fluctuating prices of raw material in global markets could also impact the battery prices in India. An increase in the price of batteries could increase the already high cost of electric vehicles and be a hindrance to the sale of EVs.

Many Indian companies have already started looking at this lucrative opportunity and have either already established or announced plans to set up recycling operations.

MG Motor and Hyundai which have launched their electric cars- ZS EV and Kona Electric in the Indian market already have institutional partners for battery waste disposal. MG partnered with Umicore, a lithium battery recycling solutions provider, for effective life cycle management of the batteries used in the e-ZS electric vehicle.

In August 2019, Tata Chemicals launched its lithium-ion battery recycling operations in Mumbai. The operations, launched at the pilot-scale, could recycle the spent batteries successfully.
Mahindra Electric also had expressed its plans to enable EV battery recycling, in a method similar to the recycling of cell phone batteries, with the help of a supply partner.

Battery recycling process

The two most rational solutions for reusing and recycling used lithium-ion batteries have been second life use and closed-loop recycling processes.