In view of the upcoming requirements of the new EU Battery Regulation, battery manufacturers will need to adopt their business practices to comply with the mandatory minimum recycled material content levels into the production of new battery cells by the end of this decade. This offers both challenges and opportunities, particularly in terms of innovation and long-term competitiveness. According to our research, there is at present no recycled material on the open market that would fulfill these guidelines of the EU Battery Regulation, which is why many battery cell manufacturers are currently looking for individual solutions.
One of these is the production of their own recycled material by directly recycling production waste from battery cell production. This solution is attractive because the waste is generated anyway, and the composition [1] and material properties are known.
At the same time, implementing recycling processes in production can be a strategy for continuously improving resource and cost efficiency while reducing the environmental impact of battery cell production [2], thus increasing sustainability in battery cell production in the long term.
At present, direct recycling is still in the development phase [3] and there is no state-of-the-art process route that can be applied universally. There are still many challenges to be overcome in implementing a direct scrap recycling process, including scaling up and validating the process routes on a large scale. Also, the question of what possible future business models might look like has also not yet been answered.
Therefore, this work depicts the status and challenges of implementing a direct recycling process route for battery production scrap. Possible process routes and business models are considered and analyzed. In conclusion, recommendations for actions to implement direct recycling processes into a battery cell manufactory are derived.

1. Gaines, L., Dai, Q., Vaughey, J. T. & Gillard, S. Direct Recycling R&D at the ReCell Center. Recycling 6; 10.3390/recycling6020031 (2021).
2. Lefherz, H., Dilger, N., Melzig, S., Cerdas, F. & Zellmer, S. Tighten the loop – Potential for reduction of environmental impacts by direct recycling of battery production waste. Procedia CIRP 116, 65–70; 10.1016/j.procir.2023.02.012 (2023).
3. Chen, M. et al. Recycling End-of-Life Electric Vehicle Lithium-Ion Batteries. Joule 3, 2622–2646; 10.1016/j.joule.2019.09.014 (2019).