Battery Recycling: Policy and Technology Trends
Authors: Shin Jae Eun 
Published: December 2024

Currently, batteries are used as a promising power source for all industries, and are an essential technology field not only for the industry but also for everyday life. Secondary batteries can be charged or discharged within the allowed range, so they can be used continuously for the life of the battery, and the demand for secondary batteries capable of semi-permanent charging/discharging is increasing through the development of technologies such as IoT, AI, and electric vehicles. In particular, the global electric vehicle conversion speed is very fast, and through this, the spent battery reuse/recycling industry is rapidly growing. The supply chain of the battery market consists of raw materials, materials/parts, products, consumers, and recycling. Along with the increase in demand, the field of waste battery recycling is attracting attention with carbon neutrality, and technology development is being carried out in detail by being divided into areas such as reuse, re-manufacturing, and recycling. Among them, the spent battery reuse/recycling market is expected to grow 19 times from $10.77 billion in 2023 to $208.94 billion in 2040, and battery recycling is emerging as a way to secure a stable supply chain for battery metals as the rapid occurrence of spent batteries is expected.

In addition, it is important to strengthen the eco-friendliness of the battery industry due to strengthening global carbon neutrality policies and visualizing climate trade regulations. As the demand for key minerals such as lithium and graphite increase and competition to secure global key minerals is in full swing due to changes in industrial paradigms such as decarbonization/electrification, it is also very important to secure competitiveness in securing key minerals. Resource recovery technology for waste batteries is required to respond to supply chain issues and ESG issues, and the importance of recycling waste batteries is increasing. The waste battery supply market is being formed mainly in the United States, China, and Europe, and among them, the United States and Europe are expected to inevitably switch to an eco-friendly battery reuse/recycling market in terms of intensive environmental regulations and supply chain stabilization. Therefore, it is very necessary to develop next-generation technologies related to the recycling of spent batteries.

The waste battery recycling process can be defined as a technology that extracts expensive rare metals from the anode active material of waste batteries. Currently, research and development are being conducted centering on lithium cobalt oxide, a small lithium secondary battery, but it is gradually changing centering on nickel cobalt manganese, a medium and large secondary battery for electric vehicles. The rare metal recovery process is divided into a process of removing and crushing the risk of explosion of a waste battery, which is a pre-treatment process, and recovering the rare metal using a chemical solution, which is a post-treatment process. The post-treatment process has higher technical difficulty, uses a solvent extraction method, and a technology that recovers rare metals such as cobalt and nickel and purifies them to a purity of 99.9% or higher is applied while repeatedly performing the solvent extraction method and electrolytic refining. Advanced technology is being developed to improve the performance of post-treatment technology around the world.

Technologies such as reducing the production cost of cathode materials, achieving more than 99% recovery of core metals, and reducing wastewater discharge in spent battery reuse/recycling technologies need to be studied intensively.

It is expected to secure a stable rare metal through the recycling of waste batteries, and it will be very important to secure battery resource technology through this.