CATL and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation have unveiled a landmark whitepaper at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2026, setting out the world’s first integrated and actionable roadmap for a circular economy in electric vehicle (EV) batteries and critical minerals.
Titled Leading the Charge – Turning Risk into Reward with a Circular Economy for EV Batteries and Critical Minerals, the report provides a practical, industry-backed framework for redesigning how EV batteries are developed, deployed, recovered, and reintegrated across multiple lifecycles. The whitepaper marks a major milestone in the strategic collaboration between CATL and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.
Developed with contributions from more than 30 organizations across the EV battery value chain — including CATL, DHL, Volvo, Jaguar Land Rover, leading research institutions, and non-governmental organizations — the report translates circular economy principles into real-world, deployable actions grounded in industrial practice.
As the founding strategic partner of the Foundation’s Critical Minerals Mission, CATL played a central role in shaping the roadmap, aligning it with its Global Energy Circularity Commitment. A key ambition highlighted in the report is CATL’s long-term goal to decouple battery growth from dependence on virgin raw material extraction.
The whitepaper outlines how a circular EV battery system can unlock significant environmental and economic benefits. By keeping batteries and critical minerals in use across multiple lifecycles, the approach reduces demand for newly mined materials, lowers emissions, supports renewable energy integration, and strengthens supply chain resilience. At the same time, it improves material efficiency, reduces waste and operational costs, and creates new revenue opportunities, while distributing economic benefits more equitably across regions.
Five pillars of a circular battery system
The report identifies five interdependent actions essential to building a resilient and high-value circular EV battery ecosystem:
- Designing batteries for circularity rather than disposal
- Rethinking battery service within optimized energy–mobility systems
- Scaling circular business models that treat batteries as long-term assets
- Building and co-investing in regional circular infrastructure
- Enabling circular operations through data, standards, and supportive policy
From roadmap to reality
CATL has already begun implementing many of these system-level actions. By separating batteries from vehicles and managing them as centrally controlled assets, the company has increased battery utilization, enabled scheduled maintenance, and ensured predictable recovery at end of use. CATL currently operates more than 1,000 passenger-vehicle and over 300 commercial-vehicle battery swap stations, supported by an ecosystem of more than 100 partners.
This system-level integration enables high-quality recovery at scale. CATL reports recovery rates of 99.6% for nickel, cobalt, and manganese, and 96.5% for lithium, with recycling capacity expanding toward 270,000 tonnes per year. The company is also advancing alternative chemistries, such as sodium-ion batteries, which rely on widely available materials and can reduce lifecycle carbon emissions per kilowatt-hour by up to 60%.
Scaling circularity globally
“This report marks a major milestone in the global journey towards a circular battery economy,” said Jiang Li, Vice-Chairman and Board Secretary of CATL. “Circular battery systems must now be scaled across regions, industries, and applications — from EVs to energy storage — and adapted to diverse market contexts.”
Wen-Yu Weng, executive leader for critical minerals at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, emphasized the urgency of the transition. “As EV adoption accelerates, a circular economy for batteries and critical minerals is no longer optional — it is essential to affordability, resilience, and long-term growth, while reducing environmental and social impacts,” she said.
For CATL, the initiative supports its broader pathway to carbon neutrality, building on its achievement of carbon-neutral battery plants and its target to reach carbon neutrality across the full value chain by 2035.
The launch of the whitepaper represents an early milestone in the ongoing collaboration between CATL and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. The next phase will focus on stress-testing circular approaches in real-world environments to better understand how design, use, life extension, collection, and recycling loops function together at scale.
