Battery knowledge · Recycling and end of life
Material recovery target
The EU Battery Regulation's per-element targets for recyclers: by the end of 2027, 90 % of the cobalt, nickel and copper and 50 % of the lithium in waste batteries must be recovered, rising to 95 % and 80 % by the end of 2031. Each rate is the mass of the element recovered in usable form over its mass in the waste batteries.
- Also called
- recovery of materials, material recovery rate
Example
A route recovers the product of its steps
R = 0.920 × 0.980 × 0.990 × 0.980 = 0.875, 2.5 points under the 90 % the EU asks for cobalt, nickel and copper by the end of 2027. With the other factors fixed, the black-mass yield reaches that row from 0.947.
Each factor is held fixed and independent of the others, and metal that is not lost is counted as product. Real plants trade the factors off, and product purity is not modelled. The defaults are the study’s cited process figures for nickel and cobalt.
Explore the graph
Each unit passes on a share of what reaches it; the recovery through the route is their product.
R = 0.920 × 0.980 × 0.990 × 0.980 = 0.875, 2.5 points under the 90 % the EU asks for cobalt, nickel and copper by the end of 2027. With the other factors fixed, the black-mass yield reaches that row from 0.947.
R = y_black mass × η_leach × (1 − c_cake) × r_extraction
Illustrative model. Each factor is held fixed and independent of the others, and metal that is not lost is counted as product. Real plants trade the factors off, and product purity is not modelled. The defaults are the study’s cited process figures for nickel and cobalt.
Use in Lemonergy
Distinguish recovered material from a qualified product.
This is a reference concept. No executable Lemonergy block has been verified for this term.
References & further reading
Further reading on this topic
These sources provide broader context; they are not presented as citations for every statement in this entry.
- Lithium-Ion Battery Recycling
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Topic background · Battery construction, recycling routes and U.S. waste-management context.
- Recycling lithium-ion batteries from electric vehicles
Gavin Harper et al. · Nature · 2019
Topic background · Reuse, disassembly and mechanical, hydro-, pyro- and direct recycling routes.