Cirba Solutions, one of North America's largest lithium-ion battery recyclers, has released a study identifying a continuing education gap around battery recycling — a finding with direct implications for feedstock collection across the continent's processing base.

The study, reported by Recycling Today, frames the core problem in operational terms: consumer and end-user uncertainty about which batteries can be recycled, and through which channels, constrains the volume of material reaching processors. For a company that operates industrial-scale processing capacity, that knowledge deficit is not an abstract communications problem. It is a feedstock question.

This matters because battery recycling economics depend on collected tonnage. Processors invest in mechanical and hydrometallurgical capacity — shredding, black mass production, recovery of lithium, nickel and cobalt — on the assumption that end-of-life volumes will scale. Collection rates that lag installed capacity squeeze utilization rates, and with them, unit economics. An education gap at the consumer level therefore propagates upstream into plant-level throughput.

The gap also carries a safety dimension. Batteries that consumers misunderstand at end of life frequently end up in the wrong stream — tucked into household curbside bins, for instance — where damaged cells can ignite in collection trucks and material recovery facilities. Industry groups and processors have repeatedly flagged thermal events at MRFs tied to improperly discarded lithium-ion cells. Education campaigns are one of the few levers available to reduce that incident rate.

Cirba Solutions has positioned itself as a leading voice in this space. The company operates multiple processing sites across the United States and has been expanding capacity in step with rising electric vehicle production and the approaching wave of first-generation EV retirements. Its decision to commission and publish consumer research signals that even vertically integrated processors see collection behavior as a bottleneck they cannot engineer around on the plant floor alone.

For municipal and retail collection programs, the findings reinforce a message the recycling sector has been delivering for years: consumers act when the disposal pathway is obvious, local and clearly labeled. Where drop-off points are sparse or messaging is contradictory, batteries stay in drawers, garages and waste bins. Every battery that never reaches a processor is material — lithium, nickel, cobalt, copper — that the supply chain must otherwise source virgin.

The timing of the study is significant. North America is in a build-out phase for battery recycling capacity, with multiple companies commissioning or expanding facilities ahead of projected end-of-life EV volumes and production scrap flows. Ex-works scrap from gigafactories will carry early-stage utilization at many plants, but long-run economics rest on consumer-electronics and EV packs actually being returned. Studies like this one quantify how far actual return behavior may sit from the volumes capacity planners assume.

What to watch next: whether Cirba Solutions and its peers translate the findings into funded collection infrastructure and standardized labeling, and whether regulators — at the state level, where extended producer responsibility for batteries is already law in several jurisdictions — move to close the gap through mandate rather than messaging. The collection rate, not the study itself, will be the metric that decides whether the education gap was a warning or a constraint.