The wave that has not arrived yet
The International Council on Clean Transportation, a nonprofit transport research group, estimates that 1.2 million electric vehicle batteries will reach the end of their working life worldwide in 2030. An end of life battery is one taken out of a car for good because it no longer holds enough charge to be useful there. The International Energy Agency, the intergovernmental body that tracks world energy data, repeats that same estimate in a report published in April 2026. The count keeps climbing after that, to 14 million batteries in 2040 and 50 million in 2050, because the first mass market electric cars, the ones sold from the late 2010s onward, are only now old enough to retire in large numbers.
The International Council on Clean Transportation modelled this estimate in February 2023. The International Energy Agency repeats the 2030 and 2040 figures in its own report published in April 2026.
Show the numbers
| 2030 | 1.2 |
| 2040 | 14 |
| 2050 | 50 |
Hans Eric Melin, managing director of Circular Energy Storage, a battery recycling market research firm, explains why the growth looks so sudden.
Less than 10% of EVs and most EV battery types reach end of life before they are 10 years.
Hans Eric Melin, managing director of Circular Energy Storage. Source 4.
He points to the Tesla Model 3 and cars like it, some of the first electric vehicles sold in large numbers, saying they will not reach end of life in large quantities until after 2030, and that this surge is happening for the first time.
Recyclers are still processing factory scrap, not retired batteries
Right now, almost none of the material moving through battery recycling plants comes from batteries like these. Manufacturing scrap, meaning offcuts and rejected material from battery factories that never reached a finished car, makes up nearly all of the world recycling feedstock today, according to the joint 2026 report from the European Patent Office and the International Energy Agency. Recycling feedstock is simply the material a recycling plant actually receives to process. The International Energy Agency projects that manufacturing scrap will still hold two thirds of the world battery recycling supply in 2030, with genuinely retired batteries not becoming the main source until after 2035, and not reaching over 90% of the supply until 2050.
The European Union draws the same line into law. European Union Regulation 2023, 1542, also called the EU Battery Regulation, states in its recital 30 that scrap reused inside the same factory does not even count as waste, so it does not count toward the recycled material every new battery must contain. That requirement starts in 2031 and rises again in 2036.
China is building recycling capacity ahead of the wave
China already holds 80% of the world capacity to pretreat used batteries, the first mechanical step that shreds a battery into raw material, and almost 85% of the capacity to actually recover metals from that material, according to the International Energy Agency. Even after every other announced recycling project in the world is built, the agency projects China will still hold 75% of the world material recovery capacity in 2030, against 10% for North America and 5% for Europe.
Material recovery is the processing stage that actually recovers metals from used batteries, a later step than pretreatment, the shredding stage where China holds a separate, slightly higher 80% share today. This chart uses only the material recovery figures so the 2 stages are not mixed on 1 axis.
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| China | 75 |
| North America | 10 |
| Europe | 5 |
That buildout is racing ahead of the batteries actually available to feed it. The agency projects that if every announced recycling project comes online as planned, the world recycling capacity in 2030 could be 6 times larger than the battery material actually available to recycle that year. Recyclers that year will not be competing to process a wave of retired cars. They will be competing over factory scrap, because the real wave of retired batteries is still years away.