This article was originally published in Rest of World, which covers technology’s impact outside the West.
For three years, Juan Vega sped across Cartagena, on Colombia’s Caribbean coast, on his electric motorcycle – one of thousands of recent converts to the environment-friendly option. When he needed to replace the lithium battery last year, however, he found he had few options to dispose of it safely.
“I asked the people who sold me the bike, and they said they don’t dispose of batteries,” Vega, 41, told Rest of World. He went to his regular auto workshop but they, too, declined to take the battery, saying they had no way of transporting it to a recycling facility.
More than 9,000 electric vehicles were sold in Colombia last year, a 150% increase from 2023. At least five battery recycling companies have set up shop in recent years, spearheading a burgeoning industry in Latin America aimed at curbing emissions and minimising environmental impact.
Encouraged by one of the strongest regulatory frameworks for e-waste recycling in the region, these startups now process thousands of tons of batteries a year, including a growing number of batteries for EVs. Still, they face significant challenges, such as declining recovery rates for electronic devices in general, and a limited ability to transport hazardous material.
The country has developed battery collection and management systems, but “it does not have enough infrastructure to carry out the diagnosis and repurposing of the batteries”, a spokesperson from Colombia’s Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development told Rest of World.
By the first half of 2024, nearly 250,000 EVs were circulating in Latin America and the Caribbean – a 14-fold increase over a four-year period, according to the Latin American Energy Organization, an intergovernmental body that promotes responsible energy use. To address the waste generated by this surge, battery recycling companies began popping up across the region. As demand for recycling increases, some have begun expanding beyond their borders.
Fortech, a Costa Rican company, plans to open a plant in northern Mexico with the capacity to process 10,000 tons of EV batteries annually. The company repurposes car batteries into other products. “Ten golf cart batteries, 20 scooter batteries, or five banks for solar storage can come out of an electric car [battery],” Francisco Pereira, Fortech’s project manager, told Rest of World.
In Colombia, BATx, a Medellín-based company, also recycles lithium batteries into new ones. “With the growing market for both electric mobility and renewable energy generation, we saw that there was a growing demand for reusing materials and energy storage,” Pablo Castellanos, who founded the company four years ago, told Rest of World.
Last year, BATx – which Castellanos says is able to recover between 80% and 90% of electric waste – received approximately 20 batteries from electric cars and repurposed them into about 200 banks for solar power storage and batteries for light mobility vehicles, such as scooters and e-bikes. The use of recycled materials in the production of new batteries can lower costs by 40% and reduce the industry’s emissions footprint by 50%, according to the Volta Foundation, a San Francisco-based network of battery companies and professionals.
Altero, founded in 2022 in Medellín, claims to have developed a method to recycle rechargeable lithium-ion batteries for electronic devices and EV batteries without producing emissions or waste.
The company processed 150 tons of e-waste last year, 5% of which came from EVs, Andrea Alzate, Altero’s founder, told Rest of World. “We know it is going to grow considerably.”
According to Colombia’s national energy plan, all public transport vehicles will be electric by 2035. In Bogotá, private vehicles will need to be zero-emission to be allowed in the city starting 2040.
Altero separates materials such as copper, aluminum, and black mass in a gas-controlled container. It then exports black mass – a powder used for rechargeable batteries that is highly valued in the international market – to companies in the U.S., Canada, Germany, and China, which have the capacity to further separate these minerals.
While the collection rate of industrial batteries and EV batteries in Colombia was only 0.5% in 2024, it is expected to reach 23% by 2033, according to a report by the Inter-American Development Bank, published in 2023.
To meet that goal, the battery recycling industry will have to overcome serious obstacles. While the government has implemented several initiatives to encourage consumers to drop off electronic waste in containers set up in supermarkets and malls, the recovery rate for lithium-ion batteries from computers and cellphones is less than 12% “and has been declining in recent years,” according to the National Industries Association, or ANDI.
According to the environment ministry spokesperson, one way to address the problem is to involve informal micro-recyclers, or people from impoverished neighborhoods working in groups, to safely collect and transport the batteries to the recycling facilities. “[We must] ensure that this … is carried out in a way that does not generate risks to human health and the environment, and that their job is fairly rewarded,” the spokesperson said.
Then there is the issue of getting the batteries to the plants. While Altero is able to process up to 1,000 tons of lithium-ion batteries annually, it processed just 150 tons last year. Few companies are willing to transport degraded scooters and motorcycle batteries because mishandled EV batteries can catch fire.
“Transportation is quite difficult. The operators themselves should have additional permits and infrastructure to handle this hazardous waste,” Rubén Goldsztayn, director of production and sustainable consumption at ANDI, told Rest of World. The government is drafting new regulations to ensure the proper handling and transportation of these types of batteries.
In cities like Cartagena, authorized auto repair shops often refuse to take batteries from customers because the companies transporting them to recycling centers have a minimum per-shipment weight requirement, usually around 80 kg. Because electric motorcycle batteries are small, car shops don’t want – or lack the capacity – to stockpile them until they meet the weight quota.
In 2022, Colombia added a clause in its e-waste recycling framework, making producers responsible for the entire life cycle of batteries. Auteco Blue, a company that manufactures electric motorcycles and imports EVs from China, offers to pick up used batteries from customers and repair them, or disassemble them to produce energy storage units, Felipe Velásquez, technical manager at Auteco Blue, told Rest of World.
“We diagnose the batteries to extend their useful life and, if this is not possible, we reuse them in photovoltaic energy storage. Then, we disassemble their components for alternative uses,” he said.
Some batteries are shipped out of Colombia clandestinely “to countries with greater installed capacity for processing,” said Goldsztayn. The practice is prohibited by the Basel Convention, of which Colombia is a signatory. The smuggling of batteries abroad is hampering the growth of Colombian battery recyclers, experts said.
Meanwhile, Vega has given up on recycling his old battery and, instead, hopes he can bring it back to life.
“I’ve just kept it at home,” he said. “I am looking for someone to repair it.”
Juliana Bedoya is a journalist and editor based in Cartagena, Colombia.
This article was originally published in Rest of World, which covers technology’s impact outside the West.
