Recycling is discussed as an environmental obligation and priced as an industrial process. This calculator does the second part: the tonnes of each material in your assets, how much of it comes back under today's practice and under the EU legal targets, what that is worth at dated market prices — and whether it covers the cost of collecting and processing it. Frequently, it does not. That is the most useful thing this page can tell you.
Material content scales with nameplate energy, not with state of health — a degraded pack contains the same lithium it always did. What state of health changes is which route you should be taking.
The EU scenarios apply the legal minima for lithium, cobalt, nickel and copper. Materials outside the regulation's targets stay at typical practice.
Metal prices are dated market references from August 2026, shown so you can replace them with your own contracted numbers. Lithium is priced as battery-grade carbonate and converted from contained lithium metal at 5.323 kg Li₂CO₃ per kg Li.
Price sources, August 2026. Lithium carbonate: Northeast Asia spot, US$21.76/kg (July 2026). Nickel: LME, US$17,124/t (5 Aug 2026). Cobalt: US$55,855/t (June 2026 average). Copper: LME cash, around US$14,300–14,600/t — at record highs in August 2026. Aluminium: LME cash, US$3,279.50/t (7 Aug 2026). Graphite: China spherical, Shandong, US$1,600/t (4 Aug 2026). Manganese, iron/phosphate, processing cost and the avoided-emissions factor are order-of-magnitude estimates and are tagged as such.
Material intensities for lithium, nickel, cobalt and manganese are published research values in kg per kWh of nameplate; copper, aluminium, graphite and iron/phosphate are typical industry ranges. The "other" row closes the mass balance against the pack's specific energy and covers electrolyte, separator, wiring and casing.
Share of gross material value by element. Switch the chemistry and watch this redraw — it is the clearest explanation of why NMC packs get collected commercially and LFP packs often do not.
Six steps, each with a cost and a yield. The reason condition data upstream matters is that every one of these steps is priced against an assumption — and in the absence of information, that assumption is the worst case.
Waste lithium-ion batteries are dangerous goods. Packing, state-of-charge limits and — across borders — the Basel Convention all apply. A declared state of charge and hazard class is the difference between a routine shipment and a rejected one.
Residual energy has to come out before anything is opened. On a utility-scale pack this is a real energy flow and a real cost — and one of the few steps where knowing the actual state of health saves money rather than just risk.
Enclosure, wiring, cooling and racking are separated — the steel, copper and aluminium that make up most of the mass and a surprising share of the recoverable value, especially with copper at record prices.
Cells are shredded under controlled conditions and separated into fractions. What remains of the electrodes — the "black mass" — is where the lithium, nickel, cobalt and graphite are, and it is the product that actually trades.
Leaching and selective precipitation return battery-grade salts. This is where the EU's material recovery percentages are actually won or lost — and where lithium, the hardest to recover economically, decides whether the 2031 target is met.
Recovered salts re-enter cathode production. From 18 August 2031 this stops being optional: new batteries must contain minimum recycled content — 16 % cobalt, 6 % lithium, 6 % nickel and 85 % lead.
Run the calculator across chemistries and scenarios and the same three conclusions come back. None of them is comfortable, and all three change how an asset should be planned.
No nickel, no cobalt. At realistic collection and processing costs, the recovered material on an LFP pack is worth less than the process that recovers it — the recycler charges rather than pays. This is not an argument against recycling; it is the reason producer responsibility schemes exist, and the reason the reuse routes deserve to be priced before recycling is chosen by default.
With copper at record prices, the current collectors, busbars and cabling are a material share of what a pack is worth at end of life — on LFP, frequently more than the lithium. It is also the fraction that is easiest to recover and the first thing that goes missing when packs are stored unsupervised.
Meeting the 90–95 % recovery figures for nickel, cobalt and copper is largely solved chemistry. Meeting the overall recycling efficiency — 65 % of total battery mass, rising after 2030 — is a different problem, because it is decided by the fractions with no market: graphite, electrolyte, separator and plastics. Switch the scenario in the calculator and watch which target the model misses.
The simulation engine behind LIFETIMEBESS did not start as a degradation model. It started as an industrial digital twin in production — built in Python and SimPy for a lithium-ion battery recycling plant, modelling throughput, process stages and yield.
We will produce the material inventory, the expected recovery by process, the hazard classification and the residual value for a real asset — with the evidence package a recycler, an auditor or a regulator can verify without trusting us.
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