Canada had big EV battery recycling plans, but without regulations it’s the ‘Wild West,’ expert warns
A major recycler just declared bankruptcy and the only province to announce rules is now backing away
A few years ago, Li-Cycle was one of the biggest players in electric vehicle battery recycling in North America, providing a roadmap to a circular, sustainable economy for electric vehicles.
But just last month, the Toronto-based company filed for bankruptcy protection in the U.S. and Canada after years of struggling to get a facility off the ground in Rochester, N.Y. The company said the planned hub would have been able to extract lithium and other critical minerals from recycled material to actually build new EV batteries — a crucial step that North American recyclers haven’t achieved on a commercial scale yet.
The bankruptcy is a sign, some experts say, that the market can’t sustain the industry without proper government regulation providing incentives and structure.
EV batteries wear out over time, and with more than 600,000 EVs on the road in Canada, keeping those batteries out of landfills — and recovering the valuable critical minerals they contain — will be essential in the near future. But regulation around EV battery recycling is virtually nonexistent in Canada, and industry and policy experts say without it, we won’t be ready when the waves of EV batteries hit the market.
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Mark Winfield, a professor of environmental and urban change at Toronto’s York University and co-chair of the school’s Sustainable Energy Initiative, said:
There really is no regulatory or policy regime around this in North America,
He told CBC News,
It’s a Wild West,
“The drivers that would generally … provide the sort of stability and the foundation for that kind of business just aren’t there.”
Recent reports from the International Energy Association (IEA) and the World Economic Forum also emphasize the importance of establishing government regulation to track and ensure demand for recycled materials in EV batteries.
Canada’s federal government has laid out a plan to achieve 100 per cent zero-emission sales for passenger cars by 2035, but there’s no national framework for EV batteries once they’re too old to power a car. There are also no federal regulations around EV battery recycling, and B.C., the only province that had announced impending regulation, now says it’s backing away from that plan.
Meanwhile, EV sales are continuing to climb in Canada, with EVs making up 17 per cent of all new cars sold in 2024. Last year, more than 270,000 new vehicle registrations in Canada were battery-powered EVs or hybrid plug-in EVs.
Winfield, said:
Every EV that’s sold is eventually going to turn into an end-of-consumer-life battery,
adding that in a decade, there will be “tens of millions” of end-of-life EV batteries globally.
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Canada had big EV battery recycling plans, but without regulations it’s the ‘Wild West,’ expert warns, source
