Source: Christopherchico
The emerging regulatory requirement that scrapped electric vehicles must arrive with their batteries intact is creating a formal recycling market now valued at $6.7 billion, forcing automakers and dismantlers to build logistics infrastructure rather than letting batteries leak into informal recovery chains. This makes battery recovery a supply-chain bottleneck that determines how OEMs close the loop on their own vehicles, directly competing with virgin mineral extraction as lithium and cobalt become scarcer. Manufacturers can no longer outsource end-of-life problems: they must now guarantee battery retrieval to sell complete cars, making recycling economics inseparable from production strategy.