Enabling Europe's Circular Battery Value Chain

Europe’s transition toward climate neutrality, industrial resilience, and strategic autonomy will depend heavily on the successful development of sustainable and circular battery value chains. Batteries are central to the electrification of mobility, renewable energy integration, and the wider clean industrial transition. At the same time, Europe faces increasing pressure to reduce dependency on external suppliers for critical raw materials and strengthen the competitiveness of its industrial sector. The European Green Deal, the Clean Industrial Deal, and the Circular Economy Action Plan collectively recognise that circularity, resource efficiency, recycling, reuse, and reduced dependency on critical raw materials are essential to building a more competitive, resilient, and sustainable European economy. Recent EU regulatory developments, including the EU Batteries Regulation (EU) 2023/1542, the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation and the emerging Digital Product Passport framework, provide a strong foundation for more transparent, traceable, and sustainable battery value chains. These initiatives establish an important framework for Europe's circular battery ecosystem. However, significant implementation, standardisation, and regulatory gaps remain. As the first generation of mass-market electric vehicle batteries approaches their end-of-life, addressing these barriers has become increasingly urgent to avoid future bottlenecks in reverse logistics, repurposing and recycling capacity. While the current framework creates a strong basis for circular battery ecosystems, further clarification, harmonisation efforts, guidance, and future regulatory developments will be needed to address operational realities, improve interoperability and data accessibility, strengthen safety and scalability, and support economically viable second-life, repurposing, and recycling markets across Europe. This joint position paper has been written by the Circular Battery Cluster (the Cluster), bringing together four projects funded under the same Horizon Europe topic HORIZON-CL5-2022-D2-01-10: Streamlined collection and reversed logistics, fully automated, safe and cost-efficient sorting, dismantling and second use before recycling (Batteries Partnership). The topic recognised that the rapid growth of end-of-life batteries would require a new generation of reverse logistics solutions capable of supporting safe, efficient, automated and economically viable circular battery value chains. In response, BatteReverse, REBELION, REINFORCE, and RECIRCULATE addressed complementary aspects of battery reverse logistics, including diagnostics, safety, digitalisation, automation, circular business models, repurposing, and recycling. Collectively, the projects have generated practical implementation experience across the value chain, identifying common systemic, technical, operational, regulatory and market barriers that must be addressed to enable the large-scale deployment of circular battery value chains in Europe. This paper consolidates those shared lessons and translates them into actionable recommendations for policymakers, associations, standardisation bodies and industry. The Cluster recognises that the EU Batteries Regulation establishes one of the world's most comprehensive regulatory frameworks for sustainable batteries and provides an essential foundation for the transition towards a circular battery economy. The experiences and recommendations presented in this paper are intended to support the successful implementation of a circular battery value chain by identifying practical challenges encountered during research and innovation activities and highlighting areas where further guidance, standardisation and coordination could accelerate market uptake. This aligns with the broader European battery research and innovation agenda, which aims to establish a competitive, sustainable, and circular European battery value chain by 2030.