The Electric: What’s the Right Price for Recycled EV Battery Metals?

The rise of electric vehicles has spawned a small recycling industry to extract and sell nickel, cobalt and lithium from discarded EV batteries and prevent them from ending up in landfills. But recyclers and their customers have struggled with a vexing question: How much should recycled battery material cost?

Metals have been widely traded for thousands of years, and prices are set on a global market. But the dark, gooey substance produced when you recycle EV batteries—aptly called “black mass”—is a new commodity. There simply haven’t been enough spent batteries to create a robust market for black mass. So recyclers and their customers haggle over contracts for each sale, said Ajay Kochhar, CEO of Li-Cycle Holdings, a battery recycling company based in Rochester, N.Y.

In an effort to bridge the gap, Platts, a subsidiary of S&P Global Commodity Insights, this week moved to create a market for black mass. On Monday, it added black mass to its daily report of battery metals prices, giving the substance a benchmark price. For now, Platts isn’t publishing a specific price for nickel and cobalt but a percentage relative to its benchmark prices of virgin mined metals: On Monday, for instance, Platts reported recycled nickel and cobalt prices in China at 55% of the price of the mined metals.