What ACTUALLY occurs to EV batteries? Recycled or dumped?

The mental picture of enormous graveyards of batteries piled high is one of the most common negative ideas surrounding electric cars.

While electric vehicles (EVs) have numerous environmental and health benefits – zero tailpipe emissions being the most obvious – they use materials that have an environmental impact.

Electric car batteries are the part of EVs that most motorists have the most environmental concerns about, but with new investment in new recycling and second-life initiatives, where does battery recycling current stand?

And what happens when the battery in your EV goes onto its second life outside the car? 

How many lives do EV batteries have?

The assumption that EV batteries can have just one life – the one they live powering the electric car – isn’t the case.

An EV battery is only no longer suitable to power a vehicle once it has reduced to about 70 to 80 per cent of its original capacity.

Tesla called out ‘the battery myth’ in its 2023 Impact Report stating that ‘Tesla batteries degrade just 15 per cent after 200,000 miles – the average lifetime of a vehicle in the US’.

Current industry predictions on how long an EV battery life will last are from 10 to 20 years before needing to be replaced. 

As most battery warranties are seven to eight years, drivers don’t have to worry about their battery’s lifespan because it will be replaced before that anyway.

Once a battery has reached the enforced end of its first life, it can go on to have multiple other lives. 

Most ‘second life’ uses are domestic or commercial energy storage – a fast emerging market with manufacturers, tech and energy companies, the national grid and research thinktanks just a few of the players in this field.

EV battery warranties – are you covered?

No-one should ever buy a car – new or used – without checking the details of the warranty, and the same applies for EVs. 

EVs tend to have two warranties; one for the car itself and another for the battery.

Most manufacturer battery warranties operate on a performance or capacity threshold: Kia for instance will cover any repairs or replacement if your Kia EV drops below 70 per cent capacity within seven years from the date of purchase. This is transferable so you benefit from a higher resale value.

Nissan offers eight years, or 100,000 miles, and a threshold of nine out of 12 bars of capacity, while Mercedes offers eight years or 100 to 150,000 miles depending on the model.

Avoid manufacturer warranties that only cover the battery in the event of a complete failure, as you’ll still be liable for repairs or replacement if it’s operating at a subpar level. 

And always check the fine details of the warranty to ensure it’s fully comprehensive.

The cost of an EV battery will depend on whether you repair or replace. 

In 2022 Bloomberg New Economic Finance (BNEF) put battery cost at £118 per kilowatt-hour, so a Kia EV6 77.4kWh battery would cost around £9,136 to replace.

2023 findings by EV battery report specialists Recurrent showed that of 15,000 EVs brought onto the US market between 2011 and 2023, just 1.5 per cent required a new battery. 

Of these were models predating 2015 (mainly the Tesla Model S and Nissan Leaf). Any battery recalls like the ones that affected the Hyundai Kona between 2019 and 2020 are covered by the warranty.

Whether buying or selling a used EV, make sure the battery warranty is transferable, and check how many miles or years are on it, and whether it can be extended.

EV battery energy storage second life initiatives

JLR (Jaguar Land Rover) recently announced its newest Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) initiative.

Developed with energy storage start-up Allye Energy, JLR’s BESS will use portable second-life batteries from Range Rover and Range Rover Sport PHEVs to store energy that can then be used to recharge up to nine Range Rover PHEVs at once.

Each portable BESS utilises seven second-life batteries and can store 2790kWh of energy – nearly a month’s worth of power for the average UK home. The unit charges by standard CCS EV chargers.

The BESS will be used by JLR during testing of the new Range Rover Electric to provide zero emissions power, instead of traditional diesel generators which typically use 16L of fuel per hour.

The BESS will also be used to provide energy storage for retailers or JLR sites and support fast charging when local grid connections may get restricted. JLR will offer them for commercial use too.

This is the latest in JLR’s circular economy and carbon net zero drive, and follows a 2023 collaboration between the I-Pace maker and Wykes Engineering.

A Wykes BESS uses 30 Jaguar I-Pace batteries to harness wind and solar energy. JLR aimed to produce enough energy with the second life batteries – a total of 7.5MWh of energy – to power 750 homes for a day by the end of 2023.

Manufacturers with similar BESS systems and second-life energy partnerships include Mercedes, Nissan, Toyota, Renault, Volvo and Tesla.

In March, Volvo Energy signed a letter of intent with Connected Energy to co-develop an ‘E-Stor’ system that will use 300kW second-life battery storage systems at two Volvo Truck UK and Ireland service workshops.

The system will step in and power chargers using stored power from the grid and onsite renewables during peak periods when there isn’t enough power from the grid alone.

Home EV battery storage solutions

For EV drivers, some of the most effective second life EV battery storage solutions are those that can be incorporated at home.

If you have solar panels on your house, then a second life EV battery can be added as part of a battery storage system, with energy stored used for future energy demands.

Nissan’s XStorage gives Nissan’s electric vehicle batteries a second life in this way.

The second life EV battery unit stores renewable energy (from solar panels, wind power, subfloor heating) and grid energy. You can control how and when the stored energy is used, saving money by utilising it instead of using grid-supplied peak energy.

Home storage systems such as these are also a projected way to help balance demand to the national grid.

Over time the National Grid expects to utilise battery energy storage facilities to manage peaks and troughs in demand, with battery energy storage replacing a ‘peaking power generators’ over time.

And the UK government predicts that tech like battery storage systems could save the UK energy system £40billion by 2050 – reducing people’s energy bills in the process.

Why you won’t ever recycle the battery yourself

EV batteries aren’t like your Duracell AAA – you don’t take them to a safe disposable facility when you’re done.

Once the battery warranty is up, or in the unlikely event that your EV battery has to be replaced before this, the manufacturer will handle the replacement and recycling of the battery.

If you’ve bought a second-hand EV then the same applies. If you’ve sensibly bought an used EV which is still under warranty and had it transferred across, then the manufacturer will repair or replaced it for you, and then recycle it for free.

If it’s no longer under warranty then you’ll have to pay for the replacement, but the recycling will still be taken care of for you.

Recycling of batteries – how are the materials re-used?

Recycling is nowhere where the industry wants it to be as the active battery recycling market is in its infancy.

Campaign group Friends of the Earth estimated just 5 per cent of lithium-ion from electric vehicle batteries is currently being removed during a recycling process so it can be used elsewhere.

But the expectation is that, as EV adoption continues to uptick before the 2035 deadline, there will be huge growth in recycling technologies. Investment in this area is coming from both private and public sectors.

In March 2023, Nottingham Trent University’s Advanced Design and Manufacturing Engineering Centre was awarded part of a wider £4.3million research project to establish a process to recycle or reuse EV batteries.

Professor Daizhong Su, head of ADMEC, said: ‘Recycling is the most environmentally-friendly way to deal with batteries after their second life and has the potential to turn them into a major economic resource in Europe, with a value of up to £23billion per year, as the raw materials they contain can be used for further manufacturing.’

There are currently two types of EV battery recycling; pyrometallurgy and hydrometallurgy, but most recycling facilities use pyrometallurgy.

Outdated pyrometallurgy burns the batteries into slag to extract the metals and is very energy intensive because it requires such high temperatures. On the flip-side it doesn’t require extensive pre-treatment.

Hydrometallurgy dissolves batteries in acid, so is far less energy-intensive and can be adjusted for different battery setups. HSBC puts the recovery rate for key metals – cobalt, nickel and lithium – at 98 per cent.

The industry is moving towards hydrometallurgy and a third option: Direct recycling. 

Direct recycling uses spent batteries to separate – without breaking – the active materials in the anode and cathode of the LIB (lithium-ion battery) to regenerative the activate materials. It’s low carbon producing, and is relatively easy if different batteries don’t have wildly different chemistries.

Direct recycling which will close the battery manufacturing loop. Early results show this could reduced environmental impacts by up to 54 per cent versus the current lithium-ion open-loop manufacturing.

In 2022 the Office for Zero Emission Vehicles (OZEV) opened up a £7million competition for solutions to challenges like battery recycling, to improve sustainability as we transition to EVs.

Where is the recycling industry expected to go as the EV market continues to grow?  

HSBC puts 2025 as the year when ‘close to one million batteries that run the world’s growing fleet of electric vehicles (EVs) will no longer be fit for purpose’.

The bank sees this as the ‘take-off point for a new, important and fast-growing industry that is only going to get bigger: the recycling of EV batteries’. 

As many EVs batteries begin to be retire from early-adopter EVs in 2021, and the environmental benefits and cost-effectiveness of recycling emerge stronger, tightened industry regulations are starting to come into effect.

And soon the lifecycle of a battery will be closely monitored.

This is because a new EU regulation will require all EVs to have ‘battery passports’ from February 2027. 

Every new EV will be required to have a passport that proves the origin of the raw materials the battery contains, how much of the content is recycled and their lifecycle carbon footprint, including production and transportation.

Volvo (owned by China’s Geely) has already launched the ‘world’s first EV battery passport’ for its flagship £95,400 EX90 SUV, using blockchain technology – in partnership with UK startup Circulor – to map supply chains for in a bid to be more transparent with customers.

The Volvo battery passport will come with the late 2024 deliveries of the EX90, almost three years ahead of EU regulations.

It’s likely that the rate of recycling development, the introduction of legislation and designing batteries will accelerate used and recycled EV batteries become much more common place – not least because there is very little other option.