Written for the Opinion pages of The Hindu BusinessLine, on what happens to lithium-ion batteries once they reach end of life.
Current recycling recovers the metals that are worth the most and leaves the rest, which works commercially and fails environmentally. The article argues for moving from that partial-recovery model to a circular one in which all the metals are recovered, and looks at what stands in the way: collection at scale, the economics of the less valuable fractions, and the standards that would make a recovered cell trustworthy enough to reuse.
The full article is on The Hindu BusinessLine, which holds the copyright.