Your Next Cadillac Or Chevy EV Could Have A Recycled Battery

By Siam Sukkhee Trading Co., Ltd — 2026-09-27 — Waste360 (recycling/scrap)

I watched the recycling numbers come through this week and had to do a double-take. General Motors has shipped EVs with batteries made from end-of-life battery material. Real customer cars, not test units.

This is different from what the industry was saying five years ago.

Here's what happened. GM partnered with Cirba Solutions, a battery recycling outfit, and pulled apart eighty old EV battery packs. They ground them into black mass—basically a metallic sludge containing nickel, cobalt, manganese, and lithium. Then they refined it back into usable material. Twelve metric tons of cathode active material, all of it recycled.

The cathode active material—that's the chemical guts of the cell—came out one hundred percent recycled for nickel, cobalt, and manganese. Not ninety-five percent. Not some percentage with asterisks. A hundred.

Those cells went into the Cadillac Lyriq. The Escalade IQ. The Chevrolet Silverado EV Trail Boss. Vehicles people are buying right now, driving home, parking in their garages. The batteries in those cars have had previous lives.

Now, and I want to be clear here—the entire battery isn't recycled. The electrolyte, the separator, other components, they're new. But the most expensive, most problematic part of an EV battery, the material that requires mining in countries with dodgy environmental records, that part is now circulating. Actually, that's not quite right. It was circulating; now it's been proven to work at scale.

The recycling recovery rates tell you something about where this industry is heading. Current processes pull back ninety-five percent of the nickel, cobalt, and manganese. Lithium recovery sits at eighty percent. Not perfect, but high enough that you start asking why we're still digging new mines at all.

Battery recycling moves beyond one-off experiments when it reaches production vehicles and customer vehicles at the same time. This did. GM's Spring Hill and Factory Zero plants assembled the modules and packs, then the cars went to dealers. Not a pilot that stays in a controlled environment. A pilot that actually ships.

The performance standards held. GM tested these recycled-material cells against the usual benchmarks—safety, quality, performance—and they matched cells made from virgin material. So there's no trade-off in what the customer gets. The car performs the same. The battery lasts the same. The mining footprint just got smaller.

What matters more: the cost angle. At scale, battery recycling cuts the need for expensive mineral extraction. It shortens supply chains. Over time it should make EVs cheaper to build. Should being the operative word. We're still at pilot stage, even if the pilot is shipping to paying customers.

GM's also working with Redwood Materials to deploy ten thousand second-life batteries into energy infrastructure—microgrids and storage systems where a battery that's degraded too much for an EV can still be useful. That's the closed-loop thinking everyone talks about.

One question nobody's quite answering yet: how do you scale this to every battery, every EV, every year, when you don't yet have enough end-of-life batteries to feed the recycling facilities? That's five, ten years out, minimum. But now we know it works.

Source: "General Motors, together with recycling company Cirba Solutions and other partners, has completed a pilot project for a closed-loop recycling system for electric vehicle batteries." — Electrive

Tags: metals trading Thailand 2026