US battery recycling volumes are running below their potential, and the bottleneck is not processing capacity. It is awareness. That is the central finding of a study published by Cirba Solutions, one of the country's largest battery materials recovery operators, which surveyed how Americans handle spent batteries and battery-containing devices.

The study's headline conclusion is blunt: a substantial share of consumers do not know that batteries can be recycled at all, and many of those who do cannot say where to take them. The result is that end-of-life batteries — the feedstock for a processing sector that has spent the past several years building out capacity — continue to exit the system through household waste or, at best, sit in drawers and garages rather than reach a recycler.

For the materials stream, the implications are direct. Batteries are a concentrated source of lithium, cobalt, nickel and copper. Every kilogram that goes to landfill instead of a recycler is a kilogram of recovered battery-grade material that never enters the domestic supply chain. At a moment when US cell manufacturers and cathode producers are working to secure North American feedstock under the sourcing requirements attached to federal EV incentives, collection rates are the upstream variable that determines how much of that demand recycled material can actually meet.

Cirba Solutions, which operates multiple processing sites across the US and has announced continued investment in expanded recovery capacity, framed the study as evidence that the industry's constraint has shifted. Companies have built the plants. The pipe in front of them is the problem. Collection infrastructure exists — retailer drop-off points, municipal household hazardous waste programs and mail-back schemes — but the study found that awareness of these channels remains thin, and that consumers frequently default to disposal for lack of knowing an alternative exists.

The awareness gap also carries a safety dimension. Batteries discarded in regular waste are a documented ignition source in collection trucks and material recovery facilities, where lithium-ion cells damaged in compaction have caused fires that take MRF sorting lines offline. Better collection is therefore not only a feedstock question for recyclers; it is an operational risk question for the waste sector at large.

For Cirba itself, the stakes are commercial. Its business model depends on securing spent batteries from consumer electronics, EV programs and industrial streams to feed its recovery operations. If collection stays flat while announced processing capacity comes online across the sector, competition for available feedstock tightens and utilization rates fall — a dynamic already familiar to other recycled-commodity segments that overbuilt relative to supply.

What happens next depends less on the recyclers than on the pipeline between the consumer and the plant. Industry-backed collection programs, state-level extended producer responsibility schemes for batteries — several of which are now moving through US legislatures — and retailer take-back expansion are the levers that could convert stated awareness into delivered tonnage. Cirba's study effectively puts a marker down: the sector's next constraint is behavioral, and closing it will require policy and outreach, not more furnaces.

The milestone to watch is whether pending state EPR battery legislation advances in the coming sessions, and whether collection volumes reported by major operators begin to reflect it. Until then, the gap the study identifies will keep built capacity running below the tonnage the US battery recycling sector says it is ready to process.