While the rapidly evolving EVB industry is in its early stages, it presents a unique opportunity to reshape the thinking about battery design, but achieving this transformation requires collaborative action and technological innovation across industries. Collaboration among battery manufacturers and secondary material providers is needed to help drive design change, while multistakeholder organizations are essential to bridge the cooperation gap, raise collective ambition and guide manufacturers towards designs that prioritize ease of disassembly and recyclability. For example, the GBA’s Circular Design Rulebook provides voluntary performance expectations on repairability, reusability and recyclability of a battery; the rulebook was developed in a pre-competitive multistakeholder environment and the associated score is being tested in a series of pilot projects. What levers can be used to facilitate this change? Establish international design standards that incorporate disassembly, recyclability and performance standards for second life. The development of international standards for disassembly and recyclability of EVBs is crucial to ensuring a coordinated global approach to battery design. An existing regulation aimed at fulfilling this need in the EU is the End-of-Life Vehicle Directive, which requires “the design and production of new vehicles which take into full account and facilitate the dismantling, reuse and recovery, in particular the recycling, of EOL vehicles, their components and materials.”71 The directive is currently being revised to introduce updated regulations to improve vehicle circularity, including extended producer responsibility and improved measures for dismantling, reusing and recycling vehicle components. Alternatively, the directive may soon be replaced by the European Commission’s circular vehicles regulation proposal, the main objective of which “is to establish a closer link between the design requirements for vehicles and the provisions concerning ELV [end-of-life vehicle] management.”72 The proposal includes vehicle design requirements “formulated so that they are effectively prerequisites for proper execution of the provisions on ELV management”. If this proposal is adopted, it could serve as a model for international design requirements that facilitate reuse, repurposing and recycling. Create a standard definition and evaluation method for diagnosing battery health, along with secure data-sharing frameworks on battery health and performance among relevant value- chain stakeholders. Accurate diagnosis of a battery’s SOH is essential for evaluating retired EVBs for second-life applications and ensuring operational safety. When determined experimentally, SOH offers only a temporary snapshot of battery performance. Model- based SOH diagnostics can offer a comprehensive view of performance over time and allow predictions of ageing and remaining useful life. However, obtaining this data is challenging without SOH disclosure regulations due to privacy and tampering issues. Additionally, SOH may not be comparable between parties owing to proprietary evaluation methods and varying testing conditions.73 Effective standards to enable sharing of BMS data must include uniform protocols for data collection, reporting and interpretation across manufacturers. While regulations such as the EU’s Battery Regulation 2023/1542 mandate access to standardized BMS data, they lack detailed technical guidelines for data collection and formatting.74 Developing these guidelines would facilitate better decision-making around second-life uses and recycling. Public benefit partners should spearhead efforts to convene public and private stakeholders to develop a rulebook that defines acceptable methods for SOH diagnosis, data disclosure frameworks and contractual relationships between value chain players. Such guidelines could also facilitate regulations, similar to the Greenhouse Gas Rulebook75 and Guidelines for Track & Trace Service Providers created by GBA76 to ensure adherence to the EU Battery Regulation. Expand and update standards to evaluate safety and performance of second-life batteries. Standards to evaluate the safety and performance of second-life batteries – such as UL 197477 and IEC 62933-5-378 – should be expanded and updated in collaboration with second-life stakeholders. Ongoing updates will be needed to keep pace with evolving battery chemistries and to design and develop new second-life applications. Collaborate across the second-life industry to develop a framework outlining acceptable conditions for reuse and repurposing within regions. A framework is needed to establish acceptable use cases and evaluate the proposition for second life in different regions. For example, it is generally recognized that dismantling a battery pack down to the cell level is dangerous, and therefore repurposing is only viable at the pack or module level. Smaller modules or packs with compatible performance characteristics may instead be combined for second-life applications in energy storage; pilot projects are currently testing this.79 Given the small scale of battery reuse and repurposing today, and the corresponding lack of data, collaboration from second-life stakeholders – including scientific organizations, battery manufacturers, automakers and reuse/repurposing providers – is needed to consolidate knowledge and real-world data and outline these acceptable use cases. Since reuse and repurposing are restricted or not allowed in some countries, geographic context must be factored into this framework. Powering the Future: Overcoming Battery Supply Chain Challenges with Circularity 21

Powering the Future 2025