The battery in your e-bike is legally classified the same way as a forklift battery. Industrial. Built for warehouse floors, managed through factory-grade collection systems. Meanwhile, there are millions of these things parked in hallways and balconies across Europe. 🔋🏠
John Redmayne from ERP UK put it plainly at Battery Recycling Europe 2026: the current framework doesn't reflect how people actually use and dispose of these products. He's right. E-scooters, e-mopeds, hoverboards — all classified as industrial, all sitting in living rooms.
Germany made PRO membership mandatory for battery producers as of January 1, 2026. The EU has set portable battery collection targets of 63% by 2027. But Light Means of Transport batteries have their own separate targets, and hitting them with infrastructure designed for factory returns feels like trying to run a postal service through loading docks. 📦
Companies like Circunomics are building lifecycle management tools that bridge this kind of gap — connecting compliance, data, and real-world collection realities. But the regulatory classification itself still needs to catch up.
If you work in e-bike distribution or urban mobility — how are you actually handling end-of-life batteries from customers right now? Genuinely want to know what's happening on the ground. 👇
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Lithium carbonate prices climbed more than 102% in six months. LFP cell costs jumped 15–30%. And right in the middle of that spike, Rivian and Redwood Materials quietly deployed 10 MWh of repurposed EV battery storage at Rivian's Illinois factory — over 100 retired packs now shaving peak demand. 🔋
Here's what's interesting to me: the economics of second-life batteries didn't need policy mandates to start working. Rising raw material costs did the heavy lifting. When new cells get expensive, packs sitting in warehouses with plenty of usable capacity suddenly look like the smartest buy in stationary storage.
The market seems to agree. The global EV battery reuse market was valued at $759.9 million in 2025 and is projected to hit $32.9 billion by 2035. That's a 45.8% CAGR. 📈
But the gap that keeps me up at night: there's still no efficient, transparent marketplace connecting retired battery supply to the buyers who need it. Packs are out there. Demand is out there. The connective tissue — grading, data, trading infrastructure — is what companies like Circunomics are racing to build.
If you're working in energy storage procurement or fleet management, I want to know: have you seriously evaluated second-life packs for a project, or does the lack of standardized data still kill the conversation before it starts? 👇
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2.3 million battery units just got rerouted from the US into Europe, and EU prices compressed 17% — from €485 down to €402 per kWh — in barely eight months ⚡📉
LG Energy Solution posted a ~$138M operating loss in Q1 2026 while EU manufacturer capacity utilisation slid from 78% to 61%, and we haven't even talked about what's coming: global production capacity is expected to exceed demand by ~45% by 2030. Chinese makers alone are adding 600+ GWh of new ESS capacity this year. The flood isn't slowing down.
Now the counterintuitive part — remember when solar panels got so cheap post-2021 that installations exploded? Battery costs already dropped ~75% from 2018 to 2025, with another 25% expected through 2035. Global battery storage installations are expected to jump roughly a third this year. Oversupply, paradoxically, could be the accelerant the energy transition needs 🔋🌍
But batteries aren't solar panels. Every surplus pack carries different state of health, chemistry, provenance. You can't just dump them into a spot market. You need data-driven trading infrastructure that matches each unit to its highest-value pathway — whether that's grid-scale BESS, second-life applications, or recycling feedstock. That's the piece most people are sleeping on, and it's exactly where platforms like Circunomics are building.
So the question isn't whether oversupply is good or bad — it's whether we're building the systems to be smart about it.
Who do you think benefits most from this price crash — utilities, fleet operators, or recyclers? Tag someone in the battery space who should be watching this 👇
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Most battery analytics still answer yesterday's question: what's the state of health right now? But the question that matters for second-life markets, trading decisions, and smart recycling is different — what will this pack look like in 12 months?
The Geotab study across 22,700 EVs found batteries retain over 90% capacity after 160,000 km, degrading at only 2.3% per year on average. That sounds like great news, and it is. But it also means the retire-or-repurpose decision gets harder, not easier. If packs last longer than expected, a snapshot won't tell you when to act.
That's why companies like Datakrew just raised $2.6M to build predictive battery intelligence from fleet telemetry — 10,000+ assets, 7 countries, 105 million km of data. And it's why Circunomics built a physical testing lab in Germany to validate AI-driven SoH predictions against real charge/discharge cycles. The prediction has to be tested against reality.
We're moving from battery passports to battery prognoses. The data exists. The models are improving. But most of the industry is still working off snapshots.
If you're managing battery fleets or making second-life purchasing decisions — are you planning around today's SoH number, or forecasting where these packs will be a year from now? Curious what fleet managers and second-life operators are actually using. 🔋📊
Follow @circularfelix for more on battery circularity.
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Germany made it illegal to place a battery on its market without an approved PRO since January 1, 2026. France runs its EPR through SYDEREP. Poland uses a system called BDO. Different formats, different deadlines, different bureaucracies — and every single one of them wants battery count by chemistry type, total weight, and collection data that most companies have never tracked at this granularity. 🔋🇪🇺
On April 7, an industry coalition publicly called for a centralised European EPR register, because right now Q1/Q2 2026 reporting deadlines are landing on producers who registered late 2025 and are scrambling across multiple national portals simultaneously.
The tension is real: Regulation (EU) 2023/1542 created one European battery market, but EPR compliance is splintered into 27 separate national realities. And this is before the 63% portable battery collection target kicks in by 2027, before recycling efficiency hits 90% for key metals by end of 2027, before the Digital Battery Passport goes mandatory in February 2027. The compliance stack is growing while the infrastructure stays fragmented. Companies like Circunomics are building lifecycle management tools that try to bridge these gaps, but the policy architecture itself remains unresolved. ⚡
There's also a part of this most people overlook: PRO fees are eco-modulated, meaning circular battery design directly lowers your compliance costs. Design and regulation are now financially linked.
If you had to pick — would you rather see the EU push one centralised EPR register, or let 27 national schemes compete and evolve independently? What actually produces better recycling outcomes? 🤔
#BatteryCircularity #EPR #ExtendedProducerResponsibility #CircularEconomy #EUBatteryRegulation #BatteryRecycling #BattDG #CleanEnergy #EVBatteries #SustainableDesign #BatteryPassport #CircularDesign #EcoModulation #PRO #BatteryCompliance #EnergyTransition #CircularBatteries #PolicyMatters #Sustainability #GreenInvesting #BatteryLifecycle #CleanTech #EUPolicy #WasteRegulation #CircularFelix
LG Energy Solution just posted a Q1 operating loss of ~$138M. Strip out the US IRA subsidies propping up that number and the real loss is closer to $264M. That's one company. One quarter. 🔋
More than 20 US gigafactories were announced in 2021-2022, built on projections that EV demand would keep climbing. It didn't. Sales plateaued, GM idled its Detroit EV plant, and now those factories are fighting over fewer orders in a buyer's market for cells.
So where's the pivot? Stationary storage. LG is forecasting its ESS sales to jump 249% year-over-year. They signed a $4.3B deal to supply Tesla with LFP cells for Megapack 3. CATL grew net income 42% last year to $10.4B, partly on the back of energy storage growth. The smart money is moving. ⚡
Meanwhile, lithium supply is tightening — Fastmarkets projects the market could swing from a 10,000-tonne oversupply in 2025 to a 1,500-tonne deficit this year. Cells everywhere, raw material getting scarce. That mismatch is where battery trading and lifecycle management — the kind of infrastructure companies like Circunomics are building — becomes critical.
If you're working in battery procurement or asset management right now: are you seeing oversupplied cells actually move through secondary channels, or are they just sitting in warehouses? Curious what @circularfelix followers in the industry are seeing on the ground. 👇
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Europe shreds its end-of-life batteries, produces black mass — and then ships most of it to Asia for actual processing. We call that "recycling." 🤔
The EU just confirmed a ban on exporting black mass to non-OECD countries starting December 2026. That's 8 months from now. The problem is that domestic hydromet capacity isn't anywhere close to absorbing the volume Europe generates. We legislated the end of the shortcut before building the road.
Meanwhile, researchers at Rice University showed that ~15 minutes of plasma pretreatment followed by leaching with citric acid — basically lemon juice — recovers approximately 95% of critical metals from black mass, including lithium. Standard commercial hydromet sits around 80-85% lithium recovery. And the Rice method can revive graphite for reuse. 🔋🍋
This is the gap that matters. Europe's recycled content mandates kick in by 2031 — 16% cobalt, 6% lithium, 6% nickel in new EV batteries. Where do those materials come from if we're still figuring out domestic processing?
Companies like Circunomics are building the lifecycle management infrastructure to track batteries from first life through recycling. But the physical refining bottleneck is real, and the clock is loud.
If you work in battery recycling or hydromet processing in Europe — what does your capacity roadmap actually look like for December? I'd love to hear from people on the ground. 👇
Follow @circularfelix for daily battery circularity content.
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A retired EV battery still holds 70–80% of its original capacity. Sounds like easy money for stationary storage, right? The second-life battery market is projected to hit USD 224 billion by 2040. But here's what those projections gloss over.
Every EV manufacturer designs battery packs differently — different sizes, chemistries, configurations. So every single pack that comes off a vehicle needs bespoke diagnostics before anyone can redeploy it. That testing is slow, expensive, and there's no industry standard for it. Meanwhile, the price of brand-new batteries keeps dropping, which means the cost advantage of going second-life is shrinking month by month. The window is closing faster than most people realize.
Some companies are pushing back. Evolium Technologies in Switzerland just launched a subscription model with cell-level robotic testing, targeting 5 million cells per year by 2027. Nissan deployed 12 retired EV packs as a 300 kWh storage system at Spain's Port of Vigo. And platforms like Circunomics are working to connect verified second-life supply with qualified demand — because without that bridge, the packs just sit in warehouses.
The irony is wild: we'll soon have millions of retired packs available, and the bottleneck won't be supply. It'll be knowing what those packs are actually worth.
If you're working in BESS procurement or second-life integration — are you seeing testing costs eat into your margins yet, or is the math still working? Curious to hear real numbers from people in the field. 🔋👇
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Most battery companies entering Europe right now don’t fully understand the entity that stands between them and a market ban 🔋⚠️
Since 1 January 2026 in Germany, every battery producer must join an approved PRO or face illegal operating status under the BattDG. Not "should." Must. And a PRO isn’t just a membership card you frame on the wall. When you join one, that organization physically establishes free collection points across the country, manages treatment and recycling logistics, posts financial guarantees to the state on your behalf, and handles all the reporting and transparency filings that would otherwise bury your compliance team.
But here’s what most people miss about the fee structure: it’s eco-modulated 🌱 If you design your batteries for easier disassembly and use higher recycled content, your PRO fees drop. Companies building hard-to-recycle packs effectively subsidize the ones doing it right. That’s not charity, that’s economic architecture nudging the entire industry toward circularity.
And Germany isn’t alone. Italy just transposed the EU Batteries Regulation into national law via Legislative Decree no. 29/2026, so this framework is spreading fast. Platforms like Circunomics are building compliance tools to help producers track these obligations across multiple member states, which matters when every country has its own registry (in Germany, that’s Stiftung ear).
Non-compliance isn’t a slap on the wrist either: we’re talking market access restrictions, fines, and in some member states, product recalls.
So here’s what I want to know from anyone working in battery manufacturing or imports: did your company build PRO membership into its EU market entry strategy from day one, or was it an afterthought? Drop your experience below 👇
@circularfelix
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81.6% state of health after 8 years. That's the average across 22,700+ EVs tracked by Geotab. Most retired batteries still have life left in them ⚡
So why are so many heading straight to the shredder?
Because they show up at repurposing facilities as black boxes. The BMS recorded everything in real time — temperature cycles, charge patterns, depth of discharge — then didn't persist any of it. By the time a battery reaches end of vehicle life, that data is gone. ML models can grade batteries for second-life suitability at >93% accuracy, but only when they have something to work with 🔋
Researchers are trying workarounds. A new electrochemical marker method published in March hit 74-89% classification accuracy without any BMS history. Better than guessing. Not good enough when you're sorting through what the IEA projects will be 1.3 million tons of annual retirements by 2035.
The second-life market is scaling from 25-30 GWh in 2025 toward 330+ GWh by 2030. That growth depends on data infrastructure we haven't built yet — exactly the kind of lifecycle data management that platforms like Circunomics are working to close.
What's the right moment to start tracking — first charge, first owner, or first cell? 🤔
#BatteryCircularity #SecondLifeBatteries #EVBattery #CircularEconomy #BatteryData #BatteryAnalytics #CleanEnergyTransition #EVSustainability #BatteryRecycling #BatteryRepurposing #StateOfHealth #BatteryManagement #EnergyStorage #CircularBatteries #EVIndustry #SustainableEnergy #BatteryLifecycle #BatteryTech #GreenInvesting #ClimateData #AIforClimate #PredictiveAnalytics #BatteryPassport #CriticalMinerals #CircularFelix
Most battery producers registered for EPR in late 2025 thinking the hard part was done. Now Q1/Q2 2026 reporting deadlines are landing and the calls I'm hearing sound a lot like panic 🔋📉
Every EU member state — Germany, France, Poland, Italy, all of them — runs its own scheme with its own formats, timelines, and data requirements. EPR asks for chemistry type, weight, and battery category broken down by market. Most companies track sales for revenue purposes, not at that granularity. So they're staring at reporting templates they literally cannot fill out.
Italy's Decree 29/2026 introduced fines up to €150,000 for non-compliant producers. And this is just EPR — the Digital Battery Passport becomes mandatory 18 February 2027, which realistically needs 12-18 months to build from scratch. The compliance calendar is stacking up fast ⏳
What I keep seeing at Circunomics is that the producers who started treating EPR as a data infrastructure project months ago are in a fundamentally different position than those who treated it as a registration checkbox. The gap between those two approaches is becoming very visible right now.
Which EU market has been the most painful for your team to report into — and why? 👇
#BatteryEPR #ExtendedProducerResponsibility #CircularEconomy #BatteryCircularity #BatteryRegulation #EUBatteryRegulation #BatteryPassport #BatteryRecycling #CleanEnergyTransition #EVBatteries #SustainableEnergy #CircularBatteries #BatteryCompliance #EPRCompliance #GreenPolicy #BatteryIndustry #EnergyStorage #CircularSupplyChain #SustainabilityPolicy #RecycledContent #BatteryLifecycle #EVIndustry #ClimatePolicy #Circunomics #WasteRegulation
We talk endlessly about recovering lithium, cobalt, and nickel from spent batteries. Meanwhile the single largest component by weight — graphite, at roughly 10–15% of cell weight — gets burned or thrown away in almost every recycling facility operating today. 🔥
Less than 10% of global battery waste is recycled at all. And even within that tiny fraction, graphite is treated like trash. It's the anode material. It's irreplaceable in current cell chemistries. And demand is projected to become a serious bottleneck for battery production in the next few years.
Last week Rice University published results on a plasma pretreatment method that recovers ~95% of critical minerals using citric acid — the stuff in lemon juice — at room temperature. But the part that caught my attention: it regenerates graphite in reusable form. That's something virtually no industrial process manages right now. 🍋⚡
The EU mandates 65% collection rates by 2027. We're nowhere close. And even when we do collect, we're missing the biggest piece. Companies working across the full battery lifecycle — like Circunomics in the trading, passport, and analytics space — understand that circularity means accounting for every material, not just the expensive metals.
So here's what I want to know from anyone working in recycling or cathode/anode supply chains: is graphite recovery on your roadmap, or is it still an afterthought? Drop your perspective 👇
#BatteryRecycling #GraphiteRecovery #CircularEconomy #BatteryCircularity #EVBatteries #CriticalMinerals #CleanEnergyTransition #BatteryMaterials #Sustainability #LithiumIonBattery #SecondLife #EUBatteryRegulation #AnodeMaterials #UrbanMining #BatteryPassport #Hydrometallurgy #GreenTech #EnergyStorage #CircularBatteries #SupplyChainResilience #BatteryIndustry #ClimateAction #SustainableInvesting #Circunomics #CircularFelix
