Management Supply Chains Electric Vehicle Battery Recycling

The electric vehicle market—with an annual growth rate of more than 152% and reaching 75% of the market share of energy storage systems—poses qualitative and quantitative changes to the development of the market for electric vehicle battery recycling, where the recycling rate is only 7%. A related market for the production of electric vehicle batteries and the organization of logistics chains for the disposal of spent batteries is being formed, which functions with the state support of the electric vehicle industry. Recycling batteries takes place on an organizational and technological platform using pyrolysis, metallurgical and hydrometallurgical processes, and a combined variant of recycling electric vehicle batteries is also being developed. Such reorientation from simple processing is a consequence of environmental requirements and the economic need to offset the costs of rare and expensive metals partially. This study assesses the development of methods to use and recycle electric vehicle batteries under four scenarios, depending on state regulation and financing levels and on world exchange prices for non-ferrous and rare earth metals. The transition to new technological processing will allow repurposing up to 85% of the used metals. The problem of processing lithium batteries will become more acute in connection with the growing demand for lithium. Therefore, with a production volume of 536.71 trillion electric vehicles, markets will reach equilibrium where lithium will be obtained through the complete recycling of batteries.