Tens of thousands of used electric car and energy storage batteries are piling up in the UK, highlighting gaps in the country’s battery supply chain, industry experts have warned.
Despite its early EV adoption, the UK lacks the supply chain to recycle batteries. Up to 90 per cent of the approximate 23,500 batteries that have reached their end of life are in storage rather than being reused or recycled, according to estimates by battery start-up Altilium and its partner recell.store, an online marketplace.
“The UK’s ‘latent stockpile’ of batteries is a serious, growing problem,” said Christian Marston, chief executive of Altilium.
Although Europe as a whole faces a lack of battery recycling infrastructure, experts fear that the UK is at particular risk of falling behind given the lack of a homegrown EV battery industry.
Most of the batteries in warehouses come from early EV models and electric cars written off following accidents, with about 30 per cent from energy storage projects, according to the start-up.
While the low level of EVs at the end of their lives made it hard to get the scale required to recycle batteries affordably until recently, the growing penetration of battery-run cars has meant that the inventory has been steadily rising. Market analysis group CRU also said 20,000 was a reasonable estimate of the UK stockpile of used batteries.
Chris Hazell, chief executive of Fellten, which provides energy storage solutions using repurposed EV batteries, believes stockpiles are at a point where recycling could become viable. “We’re in that place now where people are saying [enough] batteries are stored and stacked up,” he said.
The decline in the cost of raw materials has made battery recycling commercially unattractive. Used EV batteries contain a range of metals deemed important by policymakers, including lithium and nickel, supplies of which western governments are racing to secure supplies. However, low prices of battery raw materials such as lithium make it challenging to recoup profits from recycling.
Julia Harty, from price reporting agency Fastmarkets, said the composition of lithium iron phosphate batteries, used in EVs, meant they were not worth recycling at present. The price of lithium, the most valuable component, has plummeted since 2022.
Used batteries are shredded into “black mass” that can be reprocessed, but exporting the material is expensive, cumbersome and classified as hazardous. Used lithium-ion batteries pose a significant risk of fire, making it difficult to secure insurance to ship them overseas for recycling while prohibiting their disposal at landfill.
“EV batteries are costly to dispose of and can’t go to landfill, but shredding EV packs is also costly,” said Max Reid, head of battery costs at market analysis group CRU.
Although the UK has battery shredding capacity, it has no commercial refining, meaning material must be shipped overseas.
In addition to the lack of recycling infrastructure in the UK, executives blame a patchwork of regulation and standards for sluggish growth in battery recycling.
There was “no governance or regulation or process for people to follow . . . so [the batteries] just go nowhere,” said Alan Bastey, customer relationship director and EV specialist at Zenith, which has a partnership with Altilium.
Bastey said second-hand batteries have a black market, but cautioned that “you’ve got no idea what you’re buying, which can be dangerous”. Some appeared to end up on online marketplace eBay, while the batteries from vehicles that Zenith had sold to a salvage company were “in a storage container, which creates a fire risk and environmental hazard as they degrade,” he said.
On a carmaker level, Jaguar Land Rover said it stored used batteries for its “battery reuse programme”, or they were “being responsibly processed and recycled with our partners”.
Nissan also collects batteries that have reached the end of their life for free to repurpose or recycle them.
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