What share of lithium-ion batteries are recycled?

We don't know, is the honest answer. But the 5% figure seems to be a myth.

I have a love-hate relationship with “zombie statistics”. Those are false numbers that are repeated over and over until they become conventional wisdom. They’re annoying because they can negatively influence policymaking, drive investment and focus on the wrong things, and skew public discussion. At the same time, the detective work of finding their origins can be fun.

In the last week, I’ve been looking at the statistic that: 

Soon, you’ll see why I chose to add that as a screenshot. Michael Liebreich brought this to my attention on his podcast Cleaning Up. He was interviewing battery recycling expert, Hans Eric Melin, who has been trying to debunk this statistic for years.

I highly recommend that you go and listen to the full episode to get it straight from the expert’s mouth. And read Hans’s detailed post here that unpacks the bigger story.

Here, I wanted to give some background on where this myth comes from and track the threads that seemingly turned it into the “ground truth”.

I wanted to do this for a few reasons. One, I found it interesting to unpack and thought followers of this newsletter would do too. It can be hard to dismantle zombie statistics once they take hold, so the more constructive pushback it gets, the better. And finally, I was alarmed that when I googled “What percentage of lithium-ion batteries are recycled?” the snippet was from Eric’s article, but only quoted the statistic he was debunking! Oops.

Hans wrote a lengthy post explaining why the 5% figure was false. But the first thing people see on Google is the set-up quote he’s trying to debunk. I guarantee that most people will not click through to the article to read more, so they’ll take 5% as the truth and move on.

That’s also why I will not repeat the false claims in text form, but will instead include them as screenshots that Google and LLMs can’t crawl in the same way.

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The “5% myth” is widely cited

First, let’s confirm that 5% is the figure that’s cited everywhere.

As you just saw, it was the first result I got from Google. The next result was this article from the American Chemical Society, saying 5% in the first sentence. Most other links on the first page of search results say the same.

I asked ChatGPT “What percentage of lithium-ion batteries are recycled?” and it said this:

Here is it in the media from:

• The BBC (and again, and again)

• The Guardian

• Wired

• World Economic Forum

• Many more

In academic papers:

• Nature Energy

• The Lithium-Ion Battery Recycling Process from a Circular Economy Perspective—A Review and Future Directions

• Acid-Assisted Separation of Cathodic Material from Spent Electric Vehicle Batteries for Recycling

• Many more

And even from the US Department of Energy.

If anyone is looking for a figure on the recycling of lithium-ion batteries, then 5% is what they’ll find.

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Where did the 5% figure come from?

What are the origins of this number? Let’s try to retrace the steps. Note that it was Hans that did this hard work initially. I just quickly repeated the process to see for myself.

We’ll first take the example of the article published in Nature Energy — a highly reputable journal that you’d expect to have good quality control. Granted, it was an editorial, not a peer-reviewed academic paper. But most people don’t know the difference: it’s published in a leading scientific journal.

It says the following:

The reference (2) goes to this 2017 article in The Guardian. I’m not sure that leading scientific publications should be referencing The Guardian, but let’s continue.

Indeed, that article does say 5% rates in the European Union:

Its source is a 2016 report from Friends of the Earth. It says the following:

What it’s saying there is that the amount of lithium-ion batteries collected was equal to 5% of new batteries entering the market. Um, that is not the recycling rate.

What most people think of as the recycling rate is: “What share of lithium-ion batteries that reach the end of their life are recycled?”. The quote above does not answer that question at all.

The statistic presented by Friends of the Earth is fine and useful (albeit outdated). It’s just not the recycling rate. It has been misinterpreted by The Guardian and simply repeated (without checking, apparently) by a leading academic journal.

Nature Energy is not the only one to rely on The Guardian as this 5% source. As Hans details, many other credible outlets have done the same.

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The other key source of this figure presents the opposite: the percentage of lithium-ion batteries going to landfill (with the assumption that the remaining fraction is recycled).

This widely-cited 2016 paper says 95% are landfilled in the US in the abstract:

The problem is that there is no mention of 95% in the paper itself. It references a 9% recycling rate for Europe. For the US, it gives no figure but instead lists rates for different products in a table:

That suggests recycling rates of between 10% for tablets and 40% for laptops. I have no idea where the 95% landfilled figure comes from. But it’s in the abstract, so is obviously the reference that everyone repeats.

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What percentage of lithium-ion batteries are actually recycled?

I don’t know, is the honest answer.

In a 2023 paper with colleagues, Hans estimated that globally, the battery recycling rate was around 59%. That is the share of batteries that reached the end-of-life that were recycled.

To be clear, I wouldn’t personally cite a 59% recycling rate for lithium-ion batteries. To me, that would seem to be at odds with how nit-picky I’ve been about the 5% figure. I don’t have the expert industry knowledge to corroborate this figure myself, and wouldn’t want to rely on a single paper.

But the absence of any solid estimate does not mean we should accept everyone referencing the 5% that has no real evidence behind it. I’d rather have no number — and incentives to do the work of filling this knowledge gap — than a wrong one.

It does seems likely that recycling rates are higher than 5%. The exact level, we don’t know (or some know, but I would want more evidence to repeat it confidently).

First, lithium-ion batteries are often embedded in products that people have not yet disposed of or have been sent elsewhere for a second life. The lifecycle of a disposable alkaline battery is short: you put it in a torch or TV remote, and within a week or month, it’s done. You then take it to a collection point, where it can be taken for recycling (or disposed of in another way).

Think about the lithium-ion batteries you have. You can’t really remove them from your dead laptops or mobile phones. People often tend to hold on to those products for longer. I have an old mobile and laptop sitting in a drawer “just in case my current one breaks, and I need an emergency back-up.” That means I haven’t yet delivered my laptop to its “end-of-life” management stream for it to be recycled.

Those that are collected are often sent overseas to be reused in other markets, such as in Asia. This could make it inevitable that only small quantities of batteries in the EU or the US are recycled. But this doesn’t mean that global recycling rates are low. End-of-life management in countries like China or South Korea will dictate what the global figure is.

Second, the economic value of battery recycling is high. The incentives for plastic recycling are quite low because plastic is so cheap to produce. This is not really the case with critical minerals. The money you can get for cobalt, nickel or lithium makes this economically worthwhile.

Finally, many places have regulations against landfilling industrial-type batteries (which includes electric vehicles). This is true in the European Union, several states in the US, and probably other countries too.

It’s also important to differentiate between the actual rate of recycling and what’s technically feasible. This latter metric you could call the “recovery rate”. In the conversation with Michael — and as someone who has worked in battery recycling for a long time — Hans seemed confident that rates of 90% or more were do-able. That’s based on existing technologies that can already offer these rates for the key minerals in lithium-ion batteries (such as lithium, cobalt, nickel and manganese).

Again, these metrics are different: recovery rates tell us about the technical efficiency or feasibility of the recycling process. The recycling rate is partly dependent on this, but also needs to factor in waste management streams further up the chain. To recover the minerals, the material needs to get to the recycling plant in the process.

But it is important for us to understand what the technical recovery rate is, because many people blame or justify low recycling rates based on “technical constraints”. But maybe there are no technical constraints for getting high recovery rates? It’s already happening.

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Why should we care about false narratives?

Does it really matter that the 5% number is wrong? I think so.

One of the most prominent arguments against low-carbon technologies like electric vehicles and energy storage is that they follow exactly the same model as fossil fuels: extract, extract, extract, without any opportunity to reuse or recycle. A 5% recycling rate would certainly support this scepticism.

It also matters for how we focus our R&D efforts. If recycling rates are so low because of “technical challenges,” then we should invest large amounts into industry research. If it’s not a technical hurdle, we’re wasting money that could be spent elsewhere.

It matters for projections of how many minerals we’ll need. Many models assume low recycling rates and probably overestimate demand. This not only affects perceptions of the feasibility of the transition but could also result in poor long-term planning.

Finally, we should just care about the truth. Almost everyone who looks for an answer to this question — from Google to ChatGPT to leading scientific journals — is being given false information. Or at least, dodgy information served up as the ground truth.

As I said above, I don’t have a definitive answer for the share of lithium-ion batteries that are recycled. We should be serious about getting solid numbers on it.

But what’s clear is that when you chase down the origins of the 5% number, you hit a dead-end. Unfortunately, it’s now stuck in a citation loop — one that we need to break.

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→ The podcast episode between Michael Liebreich and Hans Eric Melin

→ Hans’s post with details on the numbers

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