Japan has made significant technological progress in the field of electric vehicle battery recycling: a factory in Fukui Prefecture has been able to recover about 90% of the lithium element from scrapped electric vehicle batteries. This ratio is about twice that of similar processes in the past. It is regarded as an important step to improve resource self-sufficiency and reduce dependence on overseas supplies.
The breakthrough comes from JX Metals Circular Solutions, a subsidiary of a large Japanese non-ferrous metals company. The company announced related technologies as early as April 2025, but it was not until Japanese media recently disclosed the actual process flow of its Tsuruga factory that it attracted widespread attention. Tadashi Nakagawa, vice president of the plant, said in an interview with NHK that the team achieved a substantial increase in recovery rate by redesigning the chemicals and process paths used in the lithium extraction process.
In terms of the specific process, old batteries are first dismantled and incinerated to remove non-metallic materials such as plastics and electrolytes. The residue is then crushed into so-called "black mass", which is rich in reusable metal elements. Next, the plant uses a water-based hydrometallurgical process to extract lithium from the black powder. One of the ingenuities of the new process is that the recovered lithium hydroxide will in turn replace some of the chemical reagents required in the traditional refining process, thereby reducing the overall carbon footprint by about 40% compared to the old method while maintaining a high recovery rate.
For Japan, this development has obvious strategic significance. For a long time, Japan has relied on imports of almost all key minerals for batteries—not just lithium, but also cobalt and nickel—and a significant proportion of the refining process is completed in China. In order to reduce the vulnerability in the battery supply chain, Japan on the one hand promotes technological breakthroughs and on the other hand strengthens the recycling system through legislation: a new law that takes effect this year requires manufacturers and importers to recycle small portable batteries used in mobile phones, e-cigarettes, power tools, etc., and clearly proposes that the lithium recovery rate in the recycling process should reach 70% by 2030. In contrast, the 90% recovery rate achieved by Fukui's process has far exceeded the policy target.
However, Japan is not alone in the global competition for "lithium in scrap batteries." In the United States, Redwood Materials, a recycling company founded by former Tesla Chief Technology Officer JB Straubel, claims that its factory currently processes batteries equivalent to about 250,000 electric vehicles each year and can recover about 95% of lithium elements from them. This shows that the competition among countries in the field of secondary resources has begun.
For Japan's current recycling system, the biggest bottleneck is not technology, but the recycling channel itself for used batteries. At this stage, only about 14% of scrapped lithium-ion batteries in Japan have entered the official recycling system, and many retired electric vehicles are exported overseas, making it difficult for the key metals contained in them to be reused domestically. Under the premise that efficient technology has emerged, how to improve the recycling rate of used batteries and prevent the loss of resources with second-hand cars and scrapped products has become a new issue that Japan urgently needs to solve in the process of building battery resource security and circular economy.