Can We Build a Truly Circular Battery System?
Global Energy Circularity Commitment
Together with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, CATL has launched a global collaboration to accelerate the shift toward a circular battery economy. This initiative is designed to shape how the world designs, uses, reuses, and recycles the batteries that power the energy transition.
Circular Battery Pathways
Leading the Charge – Turning risk into reward with a circular economy for EV batteries and critical minerals.
Launched at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos 2026 with input from more than 30 organizations across the EV battery ecosystem, Leading the Charge highlights how circular approaches – from design through use to recovery – unlock economic, environmental, and operational value. CATL supports these insights as part of its commitment to advancing circular thinking and connecting design, utilization, and material capture across mobility and energy storage systems.
Latest Updates
Four Principles Driving Transformation
The transition to a circular battery economy demands change across the entire value chain – from how materials are extracted and products designed, to how business models evolve and materials are recovered. These four principles define where that change needs to happen and why. Together they form the basis for collaboration between industry, policymakers, researchers, and the organizations committed to making circularity a reality at scale.
Rethink Systems
Circularity starts with how the whole system is designed — not just individual products.
Redesign Products
Circularity begins at the design stage
— before a
single material is extra.
Build batteries for longevity, modularity, and second-life reuse.
Rethink Business Models
The most durable battery is only as valuable as its utilisation. When batteries are managed as shared assets rather than fixed components, more mobility and energy can be delivered from every unit of material produced.
Recycle Materials
Recycling is where circularity closes the loop — transforming end-of-life batteries from a liability into a source of battery-grade materials ready for reuse.
Our Partnership Approach
The regulatory and commercial landscape for batteries is changing faster than any single company can navigate alone. As a strategic partner of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, CATL is working to translate its circularity commitment into industry-wide action — building the shared frameworks, research foundations, and cross-sector relationships that the next chapter of the battery industry will be built on.
Contributing to a Global Vision
CATL works alongside the Ellen MacArthur Foundation to develop a shared framework for the circular battery economy — giving manufacturers, customers, policymakers, and researchers a common reference point as standards and regulations take shape. The goal is a framework grounded in industrial reality, not just policy aspiration.
Systemic Research
The transition to circularity raises complex questions that no single actor has the data to answer alone. CATL contributes operational insight and real-world scale to research developed alongside academic institutions and industry partners — findings shared openly to inform the policy and practice decisions that organisations across the value chain are already facing.
Industry Convening
The frameworks being developed today will define how the battery industry operates tomorrow. This initiative brings together organisations from across the value chain — manufacturers, recyclers, raw material producers, logistics providers, policymakers, and researchers — to shape those frameworks from the inside rather than respond to them from the outside.
Who This Is For
For organisations that recognise the battery industry is at an inflection point — and want to help determine what comes next rather than adapt to it — this is where that work is happening.
Why Circularity Matters
The battery industry is scaling at a speed the world has never seen before. How it manages that growth — the materials it consumes, the assets it deploys, and what happens to them at end of life — will define whether electrification delivers on its promise. Circularity is not an add-on to that story. It is the foundation of it.
The scale of the opportunity
By 2040, the global battery recycling market is projected to be worth $165 billion. The materials inside those batteries — lithium, cobalt, nickel, manganese — require significant resource intensity to extract and process. As the industry grows, so does the opportunity to recover, reuse, and reinvest those materials back into the system. Circularity is how that opportunity gets realised.
The value that already exists
A battery at end of vehicle life is not a spent asset. It retains 70–80% of its original capacity — enough for a second life in energy storage, grid balancing, or industrial use. When it does reach true end of life, high-quality recycling can recover up to 99.6% of nickel, cobalt, and manganese, and 96.5% of lithium. The materials are there. The technology to recover them exists. The opportunity lies in building the infrastructure to make it happen consistently and at scale.
Why collaboration unlocks it
EVs connected to the grid during idle times can act as energy storage assets (V2G), reducing the need for new stationary batteries.
Business models such as battery swapping, and buy-back shift ownership, performance liability and end-of-life responsibility to producers — creating built-in incentives for longer-lasting, circular design.
At the end of life, EV batteries can be repurposed in applications with lower performance requirements, like grid storage, before eventually being recycled.
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