Battery Recycling Companies: Top 10 Leaders in 2026

• Battery recycling companies processed roughly 1.6 million tonnes of end-of-life lithium-ion material worldwide in 2025
• Ranks by battery-specific processing capacity, not parent-company total revenue
• China’s CATL/Brunp and GEM Co. lead by volume, each exceeding 200,000 tonnes a year
• Glencore entered the sector’s top tier in August 2025 via its court-approved acquisition of Li-Cycle’s assets
• Redwood Materials handles an estimated 90% of North American lithium-ion recycling volume
• Global capacity could exceed 3 million tonnes a year by 2027–28 as new plants come online

Battery recycling companies are being pulled into the centre of the critical minerals supply chain faster than most forecasts predicted. Electric vehicles sold between 2015 and 2018 are now reaching end-of-life, and stricter recovery mandates under the EU’s Battery Regulation and China’s Extended Producer Responsibility rules are forcing automakers and cell makers to lock in recycling capacity years ahead of need. Global recycling throughput reached around 1.6 million tonnes in 2025, and could more than double within two years as new hydrometallurgical plants come online across China, Europe and North America.

How We Ranked the Top 10 Battery Recycling Companies

This list ranks battery recycling companies by battery-specific processing capacity and demonstrated recovery scale — tonnes of end-of-life batteries or black mass actually handled — rather than total corporate revenue. That distinction matters: a diversified miner like Glencore reports revenue in the hundreds of billions from its core mining and trading business, which says little about its actual lithium-ion recycling footprint. Where a company’s recycling-specific figures aren’t separately disclosed, we’ve flagged the data as an estimate rather than presenting a parent company’s full revenue as if it were recycling revenue.

1. CATL / Brunp Recycling — China (SZSE: 300750)

Brunp, the wholly owned recycling arm of CATL, is the world’s largest EV battery manufacturer’s recycling division, and by volume the largest battery recycling companies operator globally. Brunp processed over 200,000 tonnes of waste batteries in 2025 and accounts for an estimated 50% of China’s total battery recycling throughput. Its proprietary Directional Recycling Technology recovers 99.6% of nickel, cobalt and manganese content and 96.5% of lithium. In July 2025 CATL/Brunp broke ground on a roughly $6 billion integrated battery and recycling complex in Karawang, Indonesia, alongside state miner ANTAM. Brunp has stated a target of 1 million tonnes of annual processing capacity by 2030 — a figure that should be treated as a company target, not a confirmed build-out.

2. GEM Co., Ltd. — China (SZSE: 002340)

GEM runs 16 recycling and manufacturing plants across eight Chinese provinces plus South Korea, South Africa and Indonesia, and recycles an estimated 10%+ of China’s total retired power battery volume each year. Its “2+N+2” collection network spans roughly 3,000km across China, feeding cobalt, nickel and manganese back into precursor and cathode material supply for global OEMs. GEM’s 2025 revenue is estimated at close to $5 billion, though that figure spans its full urban-mining and materials business, not recycling alone. In September 2025 GEM signed an MOU with US recycler Ascend Elements to build a joint European recycling and materials operation aligned with the EU Battery Regulation.

3. Glencore (Glencore Battery Recycling) — Switzerland (LSE: GLEN)

Glencore’s move into large-scale battery recycling came via a roughly $40 million court-approved acquisition of Li-Cycle’s assets, completed in August 2025 after Li-Cycle’s bankruptcy, and immediately rebranded as Glencore Battery Recycling. The deal brought four North American spoke facilities (Arizona, Alabama, New York, Ontario) and a hub plant in Magdeburg, Germany — one of Europe’s largest — plus Li-Cycle’s Rochester Hub project. Glencore layers this onto existing metallurgical infrastructure including the Nikkelverk refinery in Norway, which produces roughly 92,000 tonnes of nickel annually from primary and secondary feed. Glencore’s total group revenue of $247.5 billion is company-wide, not a recycling-segment figure, and shouldn’t be read as this business’s standalone scale.

4. Redwood Materials — USA (private)

Founded by Tesla co-founder JB Straubel, Redwood Materials is the leading US lithium-ion recycler by volume, processing an estimated 20 GWh of batteries annually — roughly 90% of all lithium-ion material recycled in North America. From facilities in Carson City, Nevada, and Charleston, South Carolina, Redwood recovers 95–98% of nickel, cobalt, lithium and copper and remanufactures them into battery-grade cathode and anode material. In October 2025 the company closed a $350 million Series E round led by Eclipse Ventures with participation from Nvidia’s NVentures, valuing Redwood at roughly $6 billion — one of the clearer signals of investor confidence in the sector.

5. Umicore — Belgium (Euronext Brussels: UMI)

Umicore has operated its flagship battery recycling plant in Hoboken, Belgium since 2011, with a 7,000-tonne annual capacity equivalent to roughly 35,000 EV battery packs. Its combined pyrometallurgical-hydrometallurgical process recovers nickel, cobalt, copper and lithium at battery grade. Umicore’s Recycling Business Group reported revenue of over $1.1 billion in 2025, up 5% year-on-year — one of the few companies on this list to disclose recycling-specific revenue rather than a group-wide figure. In October 2025 Umicore partnered with Automotive Cells Company to recycle production scrap from ACC’s pilot gigafactory in France, and has set a roadmap target of roughly €800 million in recycling revenue by 2028.

6. Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt — China (SHA: 603799)

Huayou is vertically integrated from cobalt, nickel and lithium extraction through to battery material manufacturing and recycling, using a “cascade utilisation then recycling” model that prioritises second-life use before full material recovery. Its recycling subsidiary holds modular pre-processing capacity of 65,000 tonnes of waste power batteries a year, supplying ternary cathode material to customers including Tesla, BMW and Ford. China’s decision to open imports of black mass from overseas in August 2025 gave Huayou a significant new feedstock route, and the company joined the Global Battery Alliance’s core governing body the same year.

7. Ecobat — USA (private)

Ecobat is historically the world’s largest lead-acid battery recycler, handling an estimated 120 million batteries a year across more than 65,000 collection points and 14 smelters. Its shift into lithium-ion recycling is real but still mid-transition: throughout 2025 Ecobat sold off European lead-acid assets — its French operations to Campine NV and its UK battery and specialty lead business to Splitstone Capital — to help fund the pivot, while opening a new dedicated lithium-ion recycling facility in Arizona. Ecobat’s lithium-ion capacity is smaller and less mature than its legacy lead-acid business, which is worth noting for anyone assessing it purely on the strength of its overall battery numbers.

8. Ganfeng Lithium — China (SZSE: 002460)

Ganfeng is China’s largest lithium compound producer and is fully vertically integrated from salt-lake and hard-rock extraction through to battery manufacturing and recycling. In lithium iron phosphate recovery specifically, Ganfeng reports a 94% lithium recovery rate and a 99% nickel-cobalt recovery rate — among the highest disclosed figures in the industry, though recycling remains a smaller, less separately reported part of its overall lithium-compound business. Ganfeng’s expanding European energy-storage footprint is feeding a growing black-mass pipeline back into its recycling operations, a trend worth watching rather than a fully proven scale advantage yet.

9. Cirba Solutions — USA (private)

Cirba has over 30 years of battery recycling experience and was the first US company to commercially produce black mass from lithium-ion batteries, in 2015. Across six operational US facilities it recovers up to 95% of nickel, cobalt, lithium and manganese for reuse in new battery production. In 2025 Cirba secured a $200 million US Department of Energy grant to build a seventh facility in Columbia, South Carolina, designed to process 60,000 tonnes of batteries annually once operational — expected between 2027 and 2028, so this added capacity is a near-term pipeline item rather than current throughput. Early 2026 brought a closed-loop recycling partnership with Toyota covering its North American hybrid and EV fleet.

10. Fortum Battery Recycling — Finland (part of Fortum Oyj, Helsinki: FORTUM)

Fortum operates Europe’s largest closed-loop hydrometallurgical battery recycling facility at Harjavalta, Finland, currently processing around 3,000 tonnes of black mass a year — the smallest current capacity on this list, but with a clear expansion path. In March 2025 the European Commission designated Harjavalta a Strategic Project under the Critical Raw Materials Act, and Fortum is targeting an expansion to 28,000 tonnes of annual black mass capacity, backed by roughly €85 million in Finnish national grants and a potential €40 million from the EU Innovation Fund. That funding is not yet fully secured, so the expansion should be treated as planned rather than confirmed capacity.

The Outlook for Battery Recycling Companies in 2026

The next 18 months will separate battery recycling companies with genuine processing scale from those still building it. Global capacity reached roughly 1.6 million tonnes in 2025 and, per the IEA’s Global EV Outlook, could exceed 3 million tonnes annually by 2027–28 as plants from CATL, Glencore, Umicore and Cirba come fully online. Regulation is doing a lot of the work here: the EU Critical Raw Materials Act now sets minimum recovery targets for lithium, cobalt, nickel and copper, and China’s Extended Producer Responsibility rules are pushing OEMs toward locked-in recycling partnerships rather than spot-market scrap sales. Expect consolidation to continue — Glencore’s absorption of Li-Cycle is unlikely to be the last distressed-asset acquisition in the sector — and expect the gap between disclosed recycling-specific revenue and headline parent-company revenue to keep mattering for anyone actually assessing scale.