New Energy World™
New Energy World™ embraces the whole energy industry as it connects and converges to address the decarbonisation challenge. It covers progress being made across the industry, from the dynamics under way to reduce emissions in oil and gas, through improvements to the efficiency of energy conversion and use, to cutting-edge initiatives in renewable and low-carbon technologies.
Can Europe’s battery industry close the loop in time?
4/8/2026
10 min read
Feature
Europe’s battery recycling industry is expanding rapidly, backed by some of the world’s most ambitious recycling legislation. Yet, for much of the next decade, many plants will struggle to find enough batteries to recycle. Whether companies can survive that mismatch, while preventing valuable battery materials from flowing back to Asia for refining, will determine whether Europe secures a competitive position in one of the energy transition’s most strategically important industries, writes Charlie Bush.
Driven by the EU Batteries Regulation and the Critical Raw Materials Act, Europe has put in place one of the world’s most ambitious regulatory frameworks for battery recycling. A network of processing facilities is emerging across the continent, backed by legally binding recycled-content requirements that should create long-term demand for recovered materials. The market is projected to process around 6 million tonnes (mn t) of end-of-life batteries by 2040, and recovered metals could eventually supply up to 30% of global lithium and nickel demand by 2050.
The problem is timing. The first major wave of electric vehicle (EV) batteries reaching end-of-life is not expected until the mid-2030s, and the industry must bridge a difficult gap until then. Recyclers are building capacity into a market where the feedstock does not yet exist at scale. They must survive until sufficient feedstock arrives. This depends on retaining black mass (the highly concentrated mixture of vital battery materials, including lithium, cobalt, nickel, manganese and graphite, that remains after lithium-ion batteries are shredded and processed during recycling), which is often sold to Asia-based recyclers.
Whether Europe can build refining capacity before Asia becomes entrenched as the dominant refiner will determine whether Europe secures a genuinely competitive position in the battery supply chain or cedes the most valuable processing steps to Asia yet again.