With the growing number of electric vehicles on the roads, the question looms - what to do with the batteries when these vehicles reach the end of life? This webinar will explore the pathways to a circular economy of electric vehicle batteries, considering the reuse and recycling of lithium-ion batteries, different pathways for lithium-ion battery recycling and future directions for improving the processes used to treat electric vehicle batteries at the end of life as volumes of batteries needing to be recycled start to grow in the future.

The webinar will consider

• the current state-of-the-art technologies used to process electric vehicle batteries and asks participants to consider what needs to change as the industry scales into the future;
• the future demand for the critical raw materials used in electric vehicle batteries; 
• how effective end of life management can assist in ensuring resilience for Western automakers by providing a source of key raw materials for battery manufacturing in the future.

The webinar draws on the work being undertaken at the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Strategic Elements & Critical Materials by the Faraday Institution’s ReLiB project, the UKRI Interdisciplinary Centre for the Circular Economy of Technology Metals and the EPSRC TReFCo (Thermal Recovery of Functional Coatings) projects.
 

Our speaker

Gavin Harper helped to establish the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Strategic Elements & Critical Materials, the UK’s first centre dedicated to the study of the challenges around materials criticality. He is currently a Research Fellow with the UKRI Interdisciplinary Centre for the Circular Economy of Technology Metals and was previously a Faraday Institution Research Fellow on the ReLiB (Recycling and Reuse of Lithium-Ion Batteries) Project.

Recent work has been focused on the circular economy of the materials used in electric vehicles with “Recycling Lithium-Ion Batteries from Electric Vehicles” appearing in the 150th Anniversary Issue of Nature and a Policy Forum piece on the “Global Implications of the EU Battery Regulation” appearing in Science. He was also a Commissioner on Sir John Beddington’s University of Birmingham Policy Commission “Securing Technology Critical Metals for Britain” and is a member of the International Energy Agency’s Task 40 Group on Critical Raw Materials for Electric Vehicles.