Emerging Trends and Future Opportunities for Battery Recycling

The global lithium-ion battery recycling capacity must increase by roughly a factor of 50 over the next decade to keep pace with projected electric vehicle adoption, yet it remains unclear which technologies will best minimize costs and environmental impacts. This perspective describes the current and anticipated future landscape of battery recycling capacity and surveys methods for quantifying both economic and environmental performance of recycling routes, with emphasis on cathode active materials. Second-use strategies, electrified pyrometallurgical and hydrometallurgical processes, direct recycling, and emerging electrochemical recycling approaches are reviewed as leading options for overcoming present limitations in scale, cost, and sustainability. The paper highlights how life cycle assessment and techno-economic analysis can be used jointly to evaluate trade-offs and identifies key research directions related to solid-state batteries and co-optimization of battery design for recycling.