Why 3 mn electric vehicle batteries will be useful even after retirement

Repurposing efforts may slow if it becomes more profitable to extract materials like cobalt and simply make new batteries

The first batches of batteries from electric and hybrid vehicles are hitting retirement age, yet they aren’t bound for landfills. Instead, they’ll spend their golden years chilling beer at 7-Elevens in Japan, powering car-charging stations in California and storing energy for homes and grids in Europe.

Lithium-ion car and bus batteries can collect and discharge electricity for another seven to 10 years after being taken off the roads and stripped from chassis—a shelf life with significant ramifications for global carmakers, electricity providers and raw-materials suppliers.

Finding ways to reuse the technology is becoming more urgent as the global stockpile of