Battery Circularity

This report provides new evidence on global innovation trends for technologies related to battery recycling. Based on the EPO’s unique and comprehensive worldwide patent databases and the IEA’s expert insights into the key issues for battery technologies, the report presents the very latest data as a guide to decision makers from the public and private sectors. It sheds light on the main locations of patenting, the leading patentors in the world and the technology categories receiving the most innovation attention.

More than one in four cars sold globally in 2025 was an electric vehicle, reliant on lithium-ion or other modern batteries. But around 1.2 million electric vehicle batteries could reach the end of their lives in 2030 and 14 million in 2040, and today’s supply chains for battery minerals and components are highly concentrated. Battery circularity technologies - including recycling, reuse of batteries in vehicles and repurposing of batteries for new applications – can help solve these challenges and there is rising interest in the topic from governments. International patenting related to battery circularity grew by 42% per year on average from 2017 to 2023, across technology categories such as those for the collection and sorting of used batteries, mechanical processing, and treatments to recover valuable metals such as lithium, nickel, cobalt and copper from end-of-life batteries. As a potentially important secondary supply of critical battery materials, recycling will compete with primary supplies and the report also finds that innovation landscape for converting primary mined ore to battery-critical metals to be dynamic. However, there is lower growth in refining compared with recycling.