EV battery recycling has a math problem
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EV battery recycling has a math problem
By Camila Domonoske
Monday, July 13, 2026 • 5:00 AM EDT
Heard on All Things Considered
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On a sweltering morning in early July, Thomas Andrade, the co-owner of Everett Auto Parts in Massachusetts, supervises as a team of workers carefully straps two Chevy Volt hybrid batteries to a pallet, ready to ship out for recycling.<br>Selling off valuable bits and pieces of a vehicle is, fundamentally, how a salvage yard makes money. And these batteries are, in fact, full of valuable minerals: nickel and cobalt and manganese and lithium. They're headed to a battery recycler who will shred them into a fine, dark powder called black mass, from which those minerals can be recovered and reused in new batteries.<br>So how much will Andrade make off this particular deal?<br>Zilch.<br>And he's pretty happy with that.<br>"The good thing with these is, they'll at least take them at no expense," he says of the battery recycler.<br>The fact that Andrade is quite pleased to make no money at all points to a problem for the vehicle recycling industry — and for society at large.<br>It's extremely important that EV batteries get recycled. If they're treated like trash, they become hazardous waste due to the risk of toxic leaching or dangerous fires. Treating them like waste is also, well, a waste: It squanders minerals that could be reused.<br>Recycling battery minerals, the better option, reduces the climate footprint of new vehicle production and eases U.S. reliance on China for those critical minerals. In the best-case scenario, it also makes money for everyone involved.<br>But in many cases, the math for EV battery recycling is not penciling out. That's leaving salvage yards stuck with old batteries nobody wants, not even recyclers.<br>As Andrade is packing up those T-shaped Chevy Volt batteries, across the state at Westover Salvage Yard, CEO Brian Bachand is staring at another EV battery. This one is a mattress-sized Tesla battery, sitting on a shelf.<br>It, too, is hypothetically valuable. It still works just fine. If a Tesla driver wants to buy it as a replacement battery, it could be worth up to $2,000, Bachand estimates. But he's priced it at $1,200.<br>"We try to price our parts to sell," he says. "We don't run a museum here."<br>So far, this might as well be a museum display. No one's biting. And if Bachand can't sell it, his other option is to ship it off to a recycler — and he hasn't been as lucky as Andrade. The only quote he's gotten from a recycler who will accept this particular battery is negative $1,800.
Related Story: NPR<br>As in, he would have to pay $1,800 to cover the cost of shipping a hazardous material and to make it worth the recycler's effort to process the battery. If he can bundle together five batteries like this, he might be able to get a recycler to take them for free, but so far, he's only got the one. Which is why it's still here, on a shelf.<br>"This is a liability," Bachand says. "No one's paying me for it. I have to pay to get rid of it."<br>Battery recycling can be profitable — for some
At a recent General Motors event in San Francisco, the automaker announced new battery chemistries and a commitment to using old EV batteries to help feed energy back into the grid. It was a celebration of "circularity," the idea of a closed-loop system where old batteries never go to waste. In conversations on the sidelines, executives sounded optimistic about the economics of battery recycling.<br>J.B. Straubel, the founder and CEO of Redwood Materials, a major U.S. battery recycler, was bullish. "Every year that goes by, every month that goes by, it's getting more economical, it's getting more competitive," he said. "We've got a fundamental economic tailwind because these materials are valuable to recycle."<br>General Motors itself has a lot of batteries to recycle, including scrap that comes off its own cell manufacturing lines. Andy Oury, a battery engineer at GM, said that while recycling used to be an expense, it's now "a source of revenue" for the company, with battery recyclers paying for that scrap.<br>"Capitalism is doing its thing, where there's a positive incentive structure to go get those materials," he said.<br>He acknowledged that the cost of shipping batteries can cut into revenue. But a huge company like GM, which has large volumes of scrap to recycle, can optimize the logistics of shipping them.<br>The view looks different from salvage yards, which don't have those economies of scale. Think of Bachand, who could strike a better deal if he had five batteries instead of just one.
Related Story: NPR<br>But there's more at play, too.<br>It's already challenging for scrapyards to make a profit off of disassembling EVs, simply because they have fewer parts than gas-powered cars do, says Emil Nusbaum, the vice president of strategy and government affairs for the Automotive Recyclers...