Your next electric Cadillac, Chevy, or GMC may have had a past life. General Motors said Tuesday that it had started installing batteries containing recycled materials from old packs into new models as a part of a new pilot program.
The battery is the most expensive component in an EV, and it's also highly recyclable. Depending on the battery chemistry and the recycling process, GM said 95% of the nickel, cobalt, and manganese, and 80% of the lithium, can be recovered and processed for use in brand new cells.
At a large enough scale, that could help lower the cost of batteries, reduce the need for mineral extraction from expensive and environmentally damaging mining, and shrink the overall footprint of making EVs. It's the kind of closed-loop recycling the EV industry is slowly moving toward, whereby yesterday's batteries can power today's EVs.
GM said it worked with battery recycling company Cirba Solutions to recover materials from 80 end-of-life batteries as part of this pilot. Cirba recovered black mass, the dark powdery mix of cathode and anode materials, such as lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese, and graphite, that is left over after batteries are broken down. The black mass isn't reusable on its own. It has to go through chemical processing before it can be converted into new cathode active material.
The cathode is the part of a cell that charged particles travel to during driving. When you hear about different battery chemistries—like lithium iron phosphate or nickel cobalt aluminum—that refers to the cathode material. Anodes are typically made of graphite, or sometimes a mix of graphite and silicon.
GM said the recovered black mass was transformed into 12 metric tons of new cathode active material made with 100% recycled nickel, cobalt, and manganese. That material then went into brand-new battery cells. Those batteries have since gone into production vehicles, including the Cadillac Lyriq, Vistiq, Escalade IQ and IQL, the Chevrolet Silverado EV Trail Boss, and the GMC Sierra EV AT4. In other words, this was a pilot but it wasn't just a lab experiment. The batteries are actually headed to customers.
"This new cathode active material was validated to the same high quality, safety and performance standards required for use in an electric vehicle, and cells made with recycled materials performed as well as those made from virgin material," Kurt Kelty, the vice president of battery and sustainability at GM said in a social media post.
Batteries don't need to be recycled the moment they're no longer useful in a vehicle. Before they're broken down for materials recovery, they can often find a second life in applications like energy storage. GM is working with battery recycling company Redwood Materials to deploy roughly 10,000 used EV batteries for energy storage. Once those batteries finally reach the end of their usable life, they can be recycled into new cells that can go back into new EVs.
GM is far from the only automaker exploring ways to reuse or remanufacture expensive EV batteries. Porsche said last week that it had produced prototype battery cells using recycled materials and plans to put them into production vehicles by 2028. Rivian is also working with Redwood Materials to power its Illinois factory with second-life batteries in energy storage systems.
It stands to reason that Tesla has a robust battery recycling program already, since it's been making EVs at scale longer than anybody. In a recent blog post, Tesla said it is "working to reduce our reliance on newly mined critical materials" and that in 2025 it recycled thousands of metric tons of material through its own facilities and third-party recyclers. "Wherever possible, we return these materials to our battery supply chain, refining them into components for new batteries," the company said.
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