The global adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) offers a huge opportunity — but the current EV battery value chain is exposed to significant systemic risks.
EVs are moving from the margins to the mainstream. The market share is projected to reach 65% - 75% of global car sales by 2050, offering benefits including economic growth, job creation, innovation, and major emissions cuts.
To unlock them, we need a value chain that can scale reliably and responsibly. Today’s linear, material-intensive economy creates systemic risks that jeopardises this — a supply-demand gap in critical minerals, environmental and social harm, product and system inefficiencies, and supply chain bottlenecks and disruptions.
We need a system-level transformation — a circular economy for EV batteries can reduce risk by maximising value and minimising waste.
Redesigning the system with circular economycircular economyA systems solution framework that tackles global challenges like climate change, biodiversity loss, waste, and pollution. It is based on three principles, driven by design: eliminate waste and pollution, circulate products and materials (at their highest value), and regenerate nature. strategies that keep products and materials in use — including intensive use, life extension through repairrepairOperation by which a faulty or broken product or component is returned back to a usable state to fulfil its intended use., refurbishment, and remanufactureremanufactureRe-engineer products and components to as-new condition with the same, or improved, level of performance as a newly manufactured one., second life applications, and high-quality recycling — is crucial to address these risks. Circular economy solutions are more than ‘nice to have’ — they are a strategic imperative, and offer an opportunity to turn risk into competitive advantage.
In a circular economy, EV batteries would provide the maximum possible mobility and energy storage services over their lifetime and the critical minerals used to make them would never become waste. Redesigning products, business models, and systems in this way would deliver significant benefits:
Help narrow the supply and demand gap for critical minerals
Strengthen supply chain resilience
Provide opportunities for businesses through new value creation
Capture greater economic value from existing materials
Support climate, energy, and biodiversity goals
Distribute economic opportunity to mineral-producing countries
This report — Leading the charge: Turning risk into reward with a circular economy for EV batteries and critical minerals — identifies five areas for immediate action to build a circular economy for EV batteries.
Design batteries for circularity, not disposal so they last and can be reused in different applications across multiple lives
Rethink battery service within optimised energy-mobility systems so value isn’t about bigger batteries but the right performance for the right use
Scale circular business models to treat batteries as long-term assets managed over multiple lives that reward durabilitydurabilityThe ability of a product, component or material to remain functional and relevant when used as intended., performance, recovery, and second-life use
Build and co-invest in regional circular infrastructure that enables materials to circulate efficiently, resiliently, and transparently
Make the circular operating system work by increasing data transfer and transparency across the value chain, and developing policy frameworks to practically enable product and material circulation
Leading the charge
Turning risk into reward with a circular economy for EV batteries and critical minerals
Join our Critical Minerals Mission.
Do you want to influence the debate and shape future markets? We are working to make critical mineral value chains circular across multiple sectors, starting with strategically important and high-value materials in EV batteries and consumer electronics. We are supporting collaboration across the value chain to redesign systems, business models, and products, and create policy and finance incentives to scale circular solutions.
