GM Recycled Battery Cells Reach the Assembly Line Just as the EV Buildout Slows

Introduction

For most of the EV era, the industry's loudest story has been about building things: gigafactories, battery plants, gigawatt charging corridors. The quieter story, now arriving on assembly lines, is about not building them.

General Motors has confirmed that the first electric vehicles carrying battery cells made with cathode active material containing 100 percent recycled nickel, cobalt and manganese have rolled off two of its plants and are heading to customers. The claim is narrow and checkable. It is also, arguably, more consequential than another plant announcement — because it proves that the raw materials sitting in yesterday's dead packs can pass the same qualification gauntlet as freshly mined ones.

That milestone lands in the same week that Volkswagen pushed the opening of its $7 billion Ontario battery plant out to 2029, and against a wider backdrop of US EV factory projects being cancelled, delayed or reconsidered. The result is an unusually clear snapshot of where the EV supply chain actually stands: inbound minerals are the part of the industry still being overbuilt, while outbound recovery has barely started.

What Actually Happened

The programme began the way most industrial pilots do, with a small, awkward number that does not scale on its own. GM shipped 80 end-of-life EV battery packs to Cirba Solutions, a Charlotte-based recycling and materials management company, whose lithium-ion recovery facility sits in Ohio. Cirba disassembled the packs and shredded the cells to produce black mass — the dark, powdery intermediate containing cathode and anode materials including lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese and graphite.

Black mass is the part of the industry that gets waved at in policy papers and skipped in engineering conversations. It is not a battery material. It has to be chemically refined, and it has to then prove itself against the same safety, performance and durability standards as virgin input. Cirba's black mass was refined with a partner into more than 12 metric tons of new cathode active material, every gram of whose nickel, cobalt and manganese came from those 80 packs.

Ultium Cells, GM's joint venture with LG Energy Solution, used that CAM to manufacture cells. GM's own manufacturing teams at Factory ZERO in Michigan and Spring Hill in Tennessee assembled the cells into modules and packs. In September 2026, the first vehicles carrying those cells came off the line: the Cadillac Lyriq, Lyriq-V and Vistiq, the Escalade IQ and IQL, the Chevrolet Silverado EV Trail Boss and the GMC Sierra EV AT4.

The engineering claim is the part worth pressing on. GM's Kurt Kelty, vice president of battery and sustainability, said the new cathode material was validated to the same quality, safety and performance standards required for use in an electric vehicle, and that cells made with recycled material performed as well as cells made from virgin material. That is a materially different statement from "we recovered some metals." It says the closed loop does not have a performance penalty attached to it.

Scale is the caveat. Twelve metric tons of cathode active material is a rounding error against the roughly 4.2 to 6.8 terawatt-hours of annual lithium-ion battery demand the industry is expected to run at over the next decade. As Resource Recycling reported, this is a demonstration, not a supply chain.

Why The Timing Is The Story

GM's economics case for doing this is straightforward, and Melissa Flaherty, GM's director of sustainable EV battery ecosystem, put it plainly: raw materials are among the largest cost drivers in battery cells, and battery packs typically account for 30 to 40 percent of an EV's total cost. GM says recycling processes like Cirba's can recover up to 95 percent of the nickel, cobalt and manganese from used batteries and up to 80 percent of the lithium.

That is why the timing is stranger than it first looks. The US spent the last five years subsidising new mineral production, and it is still doing so, while the companies that were supposed to be the buyers of that output are quietly re-pacing their construction schedules. PowerCo, Volkswagen's battery subsidiary, said this month it is delaying production at its $7 billion St. Thomas, Ontario plant until 2029 to "align the project's timeline and product strategy with evolving market demand." The federal government has committed $700 million in upfront capital and Ontario $500 million to the project, which was announced in 2023.

Faced with that, the logic of harvesting nickel, cobalt and manganese from packs that already exist is hard to argue with. Every tonne of recovered CAM is a tonne that does not need a new mine permit, a new smelter and a new geopolitical exposure. Kia, Hyundai and Ford built their US battery plans on that same logic in reverse — building capacity ahead of demand and hoping the demand arrives.

The scale of the prize grows on its own schedule. The International Energy Agency projects that nearly 14 million EV batteries will reach end of life globally by 2040, and Cirba's own release notes that lithium-ion demand is expected to run at roughly 4.2 to 6.8 terawatt-hours annually over the coming decade. Meanwhile the market for the minerals themselves is being reshaped by chemistry, not by policy: Mordor Intelligence projects the global lithium carbonate market to grow from 1.41 million tonnes of lithium carbonate equivalent this year to 3.93 million by 2031, driven substantially by a surge in LFP cathode production — and Spring Hill, one of the two plants assembling GM's recycled cells, is being upgraded to scale LFP production.

That is the awkward part of the closed loop as it stands. Recycled CAM is most valuable in high-nickel chemistries, which is precisely where the demand growth is not. The batteries heading to end of life today are overwhelmingly nickel-rich NMC packs, while the growth in the market is in the LFP cells that use no nickel or cobalt at all. A closed loop for cadmium-free commodity chemistry is a genuinely harder engineering problem than the one GM just demonstrated.

Everyone Else Is Doing It Too

GM is early, not unique. Cirba's president and CEO, David Klanecky, framed the pilot as a supply-chain exercise rather than a waste-management one. Porsche has produced prototype cells using recycled materials with Cylib and plans to put them into production vehicles by 2028. Toyota opened the 30,000-square-foot Toyota Battery Center of North America in Michigan in the same week, as a hub for battery sourcing, applications and recycling. Rivian is working with Redwood Materials to convert used batteries into energy storage for its Illinois factory.

The second-life layer matters as much as the recycling layer, because a pack that never reaches the recycler is a pack whose materials do not come back. GM is working with Redwood Materials to deploy roughly 10,000 second-life batteries into energy infrastructure, including what GM describes as the largest second-life battery microgrid in North America, and separately runs remanufacturing and refurbishment programmes designed to reuse more than 70 percent of pack components in certain applications. Tesla says it recycled thousands of metric tons of material through its own facilities and third parties in 2025.

Taken together, these efforts sketch out a three-stage lifecycle: drive the pack, repurpose it in stationary storage, then recover the metals into new cells. GM has now demonstrated the third stage end-to-end in production vehicles, which is the stage that was previously the least proven.

Conclusion

None of this makes GM's recycled cells cheap. A 12-tonne batch produced from 80 packs is a rounding error against a vehicle programme, and the economics of closed-loop supply depend on end-of-life volumes that will not arrive in force until the 2030s. The honest read is that GM has removed the technical objection, not the economic one.

What it does establish is a template. Black mass refinement into qualified CAM is no longer a slide in a deck; it has happened, at automotive spec, in cells that are now on public roads. The uncomfortable symmetry is that the industry's loudest capital cycle right now — new mines, new smelters, new cell plants — is being slowed precisely as the industry discovers it may not need as much of that ore as it planned for. Watch the recovery side of the ledger through 2027 and 2028, because the parts of this story that look most like a footnote today are the ones that will decide who still owns the raw materials when the plants do open.

Images

Above: a Cadillac Lyriq 600 E4 in Frankfurt am Main, photographed in November 2024 — before GM's recycled-cell pilot reached production. The Lyriq is among the models that now carry cells made from recovered minerals. (Photo: Matti Blume, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Above: cobaltite, a cobalt iron arsenic sulfide ore mineral from Gorden Lake, Ontario. Cobalt-bearing ores like this are what the recycling pilot is intended to substitute for, one retired pack at a time. (Photo: Darla Sondrol, GeoDIL, CC0, Wikimedia Commons)

Above: a battery-recovery floor in operation — though note this is a lead-acid facility ladling recovered lead, not the lithium-ion black-mass process GM ran in Ohio. No lithium-ion recycling line is visible in this photograph. (Photo: NIOSH, public domain, Wikimedia Commons)

References

• Cirba Solutions, "Closing the Loop: Battery Recycling Pilot Uses 100% Recycled Critical Minerals to Power New GM EVs," 22 September 2026.
• Resource Recycling, "GM launches recycled EV battery line," 5 October 2026.
• InsideEVs, "Your Next Cadillac Or Chevy EV Could Have A Recycled Battery," 22 September 2026.
• GM Authority, "Your New GM EV's Battery May Be Made With Recycled Materials," September 2026.
• Electric Cars Report, "GM Completes Closed-Loop EV Battery Recycling Pilot," 26 September 2026.
• The Canadian Press, "Volkswagen delays production at Ontario electric vehicle battery plant until 2029," 24 September 2026.