Photo by Roberto Sorin on Unsplash (illustrative)
On 18 November 2024, the International Energy Agency published a special report on recycling critical minerals. It found that global capacity to recycle batteries grew by 50% in 2023, and that scaling up recycling could substantially reduce the number of new mines the energy transition needs.
Key facts
Global battery pretreatment and material recovery capacity expanded by about 50% in 2023 compared with 2022.
Recycling could lower new mining needs by 40% for copper and cobalt and by 25% for lithium and nickel by 2050 in a scenario where countries meet their climate pledges.
Recycled energy transition metals produce about 80% lower greenhouse gas emissions than newly mined ones, on average.
More than 40% of available nickel and cobalt from used batteries was already being recycled in 2023.
Why it matters
Electric cars and grid batteries need large amounts of metals, and mining them has environmental and social costs. Recovering metals from old batteries keeps them out of landfills, cuts emissions and reduces the need for new mines.
Worth noting
China held about 80% of the world's battery recycling capacity in 2023, and the IEA warns that capacity may run ahead of the supply of old batteries this decade before falling short after 2040. Only about 20% of the lithium theoretically available from batteries was recycled in 2023.