Sustainable Drive, Sustainable Supply: Priorities to Improve the Electric Vehicle Battery Supply Chain

CLEE’s report “Sustainable Drive, Sustainable Supply: Priorities to Improve the Electric Vehicle Battery Supply Chain” identifies the following key challenges to ensuring battery supply chain sustainability through a multi-stakeholder approach, based on our outreach to experts in the field:

• Lack of coordinated action, accountability, and access to information across the supply chain hinder sustainability efforts
• Inadequate coordination and data sharing across multiple supply chain standards limit adherence
• Regulatory and logistical barriers inhibit battery life extension, reuse, and recycling

The report recommends the following priority responses that industry, government and nonprofit leaders could take to address these challenges:

• Industry leaders could strengthen mechanisms to improve data transparency and promote neutral and reliable information-sharing to level the playing field between actors across the supply chain and between governments and companies
• Industry leaders and third-party observers could ensure greater application of supply chain sustainability best practices by defining and categorizing existing standards and initiatives to develop essential criteria, facilitate comparison and equivalency, and streamline adherence for each segment of the supply chain
• Governments and industry leaders could create new incentives for supply chain actors to participate in and adhere to existing standards and initiatives, which may include sustainability labeling and certification initiatives
• Industry leaders could design batteries proactively for disassembly (enabling recycling and reuse), and industry leaders and governments could collaborate to build regional infrastructure for battery recycling and transportation and create regulatory certainty for recycling

The responses to the supply chain challenges outlined in this report seek to provide guidance on the initial actions stakeholders can take to make this broader vision of implementation a reality, ensuring a more robust future for communities around the globe as well as for all-important electric vehicle adoption to meet climate change goals.