September 25, 2026 - GM Continues Work On Circular Battery Ecosystem

This is the Telemetry Transportation Daily for September 25, 2026, and I'm Sam Abuelsamid, Vice President of Market Research for Telemetry. 

Ever since General Motors started introducing its modern electrified vehicles with the 2010 debut of the Chevrolet Volt, the automaker has also been working on creating a circular ecosystem for batteries. In the early 2010s, following the production launch of the Volt, GM started with second-life applications. As prototype Volts from the development fleet were retired, many of the battery packs were built into a stationary storage system to provide backup power for a data center at GM's Milford Proving Ground in Michigan. 

More recently, GM remanufactured some of the battery packs removed from Chevrolet Bolts during a recall campaign and partnered with Redwood Materials to build them into new stationary storage systems. Those systems are now being deployed for backup power and peak shaving at GM factories. 

The latest effort comes from a partnership with battery recycling specialist Cirba Solutions. GM provided Cirba with 80 end-of-life battery packs. These likely came from test vehicles and its battery development lab at the Warren, Michigan, technical center. The recycling process involves shredding the battery modules and a hydrometallurgical process to extract what's known as black mass. This black powder contains all the critical minerals from the cells, and upwards of 90% of those materials are typically recovered. After testing the black mass from Cirba, it was refined to get the nickel, manganese, and cobalt, which was then blended into the cathode coating slurry to manufacture new cells. From those 80 batteries, GM recovered 12 metric tonnes of new cathode active materials that can replace virgin materials that have to be mined and refined. Those materials have now been made into new cells that exclusively use 100% recycled critical minerals and built into new Cadillac, Chevrolet, and GMC EVs at factories in Detroit and Spring Hill, Tennessee. Those trucks and SUVs will soon be delivered to customers. 

Recycling is a key component of the battery ecosystem because every battery that is reprocessed means an equivalent amount of material that doesn't need to be mined or imported. That's good for supply resilience and reduces the overall carbon footprint of making batteries. 

Thanks for listening.