Toronto, Ontario — The amount of lithium-ion batteries available for recycling will increase significantly after 2030 according to Circular Energy Storage’s new battery volume forecast. When just electric vehicle (EV) batteries are considered, the annual volume will increase by 343 percent between 2030 and 2035.
While there will be marginally more end-of-life lithium-ion batteries in the next decade, with a 25.4 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2030 to 2035, compared to 23.5 percent from 2020 to 2030, the growth rate of batteries available for recycling will increase from 18.9 percent to 28.4 percent.
Further, the share of end-of-life batteries from light electric vehicles that will be available for recycling instead of reuse will increase from 27 percent in 2023 to 79 percent in 2035.
The global volume of lithium-ion batteries available for reuse will increase from 23.3 Gigawatt hours (GWh) in 2023 to 376.1 GWh in 2023, bringing the market to a size which is larger than the whole lithium-ion battery market in 2020.
Circular Energy Storage has been tracking end-of-life volumes of lithium-ion batteries since 2017; this year’s update is the first to include a forecast going beyond 2030, with a detailed analysis until 2035.
Batteries from light EVs, which made up only 12.3 percent of the global end-of-life volumes in 2023, will make up 50.2 percent of batteries in 2035 that either will be reused or recycled. Personal mobility lithium-ion batteries (two-and three-wheelers) will make up 14 percent of batteries; heavy electric vehicle batteries will make up 11.3 percent; stationary energy storage systems will account for 9.3 percent and batteries for backup power and UPS will account for 6.5 percent.
Click here to learn more about CES’s end-of-life battery volume data.
