Since debuting the lithium-ion battery in the CR-Z, Honda has actively used lithium-ion batteries to power its new hybrid vehicles, such as the Fit Hybrid and Vezel. This was based on Honda’s judgment that lithium-ion batteries were the most suitable choice for hybrid vehicles given the advantages they bring to power and fuel economy.

However, in 2014, there was someone at Honda who had mixed feelings about the rising use of lithium-ion batteries. That someone was Tomokazu Abe, now general manager of Honda’s Cyclical Resource Promotion Division.

“The spread of lithium-ion batteries was a trend happening throughout the automobile industry, not just at Honda. In the near future we were going to have an enormous volume of lithium-ion batteries reach end-of-life. These batteries contain rare metals such as cobalt and nickel, and yet at the time no recycling method existed that could extract these metals for effective reuse. The material recycling of lithium-ion batteries was about to become an issue the entire automobile industry would have to address,” says Abe.

Unlike the small batteries in computers and other consumer electronics, the giant lithium-ion batteries used in cars were considered too difficult to recycle. Technically, it was possible to the extract cobalt and nickel, but their small quantities made implementing the process at scale largely unprofitable. No recycling businesses came forward.

Abe continues: “The easiest way to process lithium-ion batteries is to incinerate and dispose of them, but all that valuable material goes to waste. Some technologies came out that were intended to solve this, one being to use the slag from incinerated batteries as a base course material (an intermediate layer in road construction, located between the soil and the surface pavement). But all were far from the ideal, which is to effectively close the loop on scarce resources such as nickel and cobalt.”

Lamenting this situation, in 2014 Abe resolved to do something about it.

“Creating a circular economy requires that we go beyond the walls that separate companies and industries, that lead us to prioritize competition and think only in terms of what each company can do alone, and instead find solutions through collaboration. As a member of an industry that makes vehicles that use lithium-ion batteries, I felt we had a responsibility to unite with other industries and establish a method of recycling batteries as a resource.”