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For the last decade, the global conversation around electric vehicles (EVs) has focused almost entirely on adoption. Targets, incentives, charging stations and sales figures have dominated headlines. The EV transition is happening daily, at street level, across the Asia-Pacific region and beyond. Yet a far less glamorous question is now becoming just as important as how many EVs we sell: what happens when their batteries are no longer good enough for the road?
As millions of batteries enter circulation, a silent question looms. What happens when the power runs out? In Mae Hong Son, a mountainous province in northern Thailand, long suffering from weak grid connections and frequent blackouts, that question has already found a partial answer, a pilot project that repurposes retired electric vehicle batteries to store solar energy. No new dams. No coal plants. Just the second life of technology once considered finished.
For years, critics warned of an impending battery waste crisis: dead cells, toxic leaks and landfills filled with yesterday’s green solution. Traditionally, batteries begin their lives on the earth. Lithium from Australia, cobalt from the Democratic Republic of Congo, nickel from Indonesia. Mining is expensive, carbon-intensive, geopolitically fragile and geologically limited. When we discard batteries, we are not throwing away waste; we are burying value.
Photo credit: Adobe Stock Photo/Quality Stock Arts
Lithium-ion batteries carry a real fire risk during transport and storage. Damage, overheating or exposure to saltwater can trigger thermal runaway, a chain reaction that is extremely difficult to stop. In 2022, the cargo ship Felicity Ace caught fire in the Atlantic Ocean while carrying nearly 4,000 vehicles, including EVs and hybrids. The blaze burned for almost two weeks before the vessel eventually sank. Since then, multiple roll-on roll-off vessels in Asia and Europe have reported EV-related fires, forcing crews to abandon ships.
One of the biggest headaches in recycling is simply getting the old batteries back. Collecting heavy, flammable, hazardous batteries from thousands of scrapyards and dealerships is a logistical nightmare that accounts for nearly half the cost of recycling. Transporting damaged or degraded batteries requires specialized containers, fire suppression systems, trained handlers and clear regulations. In many developing markets, this infrastructure simply does not exist. The result is a dangerous grey zone where batteries are stockpiled improperly or moved through informal channels.
This is where Asia’s unique battery swapping approach offers an attractive solution. Unlike the West, where EVs are mostly plugged into private garages, dense Asian cities are embracing a shared model. NIO, a premium EV maker in China, has completed over 90 million battery swaps as of late 2025.
Much of Asia runs on LFP (Lithium Iron Phosphate) batteries because they are affordable and safe. However, unlike the batteries in high-end Western cars, LFP batteries contain no expensive cobalt or nickel. This makes it economically difficult to recycle for profit. Without government incentives, recyclers might ignore these cheap batteries, risking a new waste problem. China has built one of the world’s most advanced EV battery recycling systems, driven by strict Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR). The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology Whitelist System ensures only approved recyclers such as GEM and Brunp can legally process end-of-life batteries, pushing out informal actors.
Photo credit: Adobe Stock Photo/Marina Dubin
Governments are no longer leaving this to chance. The European Union has introduced the Battery Passport, a digital twin for every industrial battery. By 2027, scanning a QR code of a battery will reveal its chemistry, origin, health status and carbon footprint. If a recycler knows exactly what is inside a battery before they open it, and a second-life buyer knows exactly how healthy the cells are, the market becomes efficient and safe.
The logic is simple: if we can extend a battery's useful life by another 10 to 15 years as grid storage, we dramatically lower its carbon footprint and delay the need for recycling. Even major US players are making this move; General Motors recently partnered with Redwood Materials to use retired EV batteries to back up data centers, proving that old car parts can power the AI revolution.
The Asia-Pacific region, with its dense cities and massive motorbike fleets, is uniquely positioned to lead this charge. However, success is not guaranteed. It requires policymakers to move beyond simple EV purchase subsidies and start funding the back-end of the ecosystem providing incentives for LFP recycling, clarifying swapping standards without killing innovation and creating cross-border protocols for handling battery waste. By combining swapping networks (which solve collection) with advanced recycling (which solves supply), we can build a future where the waste of the electric revolution becomes its most vital asset. The mine of the future won't be a hole in the ground; it will be the resource traffic flowing through our cities.
