Battery factories waste less each year
A battery factory does not turn every batch of material it starts into a battery it can sell. The share that never becomes a sellable battery is called the scrap rate. Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory, 2 United States Department of Energy laboratories, report that the battery data firm Circular Energy Storage estimates the world average scrap rate at 7.67% in 2023, falling to 4.34% by 2030, close to half. The researchers state the main cause is the coating step, the part of cell production that spreads active material inside a battery, and call it the single largest source of rejected material. They also point to factories maturing with more automation and standardised production, which cuts how much they waste.
Both figures are Circular Energy Storage estimates, reported in a paper by researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory. The same paper states the actual tonnage of scrap keeps rising over the same years, a separate figure carried in the body text and the stat row rather than in this chart.
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| 2023 | 7.67 |
| 2030 | 4.34 |
The amount of scrap keeps rising anyway
A falling rate does not mean a shrinking supply. The same researchers state the world will still generate about 0.982 million tonnes of battery manufacturing scrap in 2030, and that this tonnage keeps rising every year this decade. Total battery production is growing faster than the scrap rate is falling, so a recycler counting on manufacturing scrap worldwide faces a slower growing supply this decade, not a shrinking one.
Some recyclers are already short of it
That is not true everywhere right now. In August 2025, Fastmarkets, a commodity price reporting agency, reported that recyclers in Europe are already short of scrap, because 2 large cell plants, the LG Energy Solution factory in Wroclaw, Poland, and the Samsung SDI factory in Hungary, cut their output. Electric vehicle demand slowed and cell manufacturing keeps concentrating in China, Korea and Japan, so recyclers without their own cell factories nearby now depend on imported scrap. Anton Popiy, market intelligence and product manager at Ascend Elements, a battery recycling company, said United States recyclers are already bidding against each other for scrap because the shredding capacity built there already exceeds the scrap available to fill it. An analyst at Cleantech Group, a cleantech advisory firm, makes the same point independently, that recycling in Europe and the United States depends on imported manufacturing scrap because cell manufacturing itself sits mostly in China, Korea and Japan.
Even scrap that does reach a recycler is not paid evenly. Fastmarkets reported that in August 2025 black mass buyers in South Korea, the shredded material left after a battery is broken down, paid 77% to 83% of benchmark metal prices for the nickel and cobalt recovered from it, but only 0% to 2% for the lithium, because weak lithium prices leave that part of the material barely worth recovering.
A payable is the share of a benchmark metal price a recycler is actually paid for the metal recovered from black mass, the shredded material left after a battery is broken down. Fastmarkets states this was the highest nickel and cobalt payable level since August 2023 and the lowest lithium payable level since this price series began in 2023.
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| Nickel payable | 77% to 83% |
| Cobalt payable | 77% to 83% |
| Lithium payable | 0% to 2% |
One recycler is building a second supply early
Redwood Materials, a battery recycling company whose first processing line was built to run on manufacturing scrap, is preparing for scrap to tighten further. The company reports it now works with more than 9,000 auto recyclers and dismantlers across the United States to collect batteries out of retiring electric vehicles, a second source of material built years before any industrywide shortage of manufacturing scrap is expected. Redwood also reports it recycled more than 20 gigawatt hours of lithium ion batteries in 2024. None of these figures is independently checked. They are the company describing its own operation.