circular-economy · energy · family: the missing yardstick
one powder, two passports
The same shredded-battery powder is "hazardous waste" leaving Europe and a "recycled raw material" arriving in China — and no shared physical specification yet exists that would let regulators agree on what it is
Problem statement
When a lithium-ion battery is shredded, the cathode and anode coatings come off as a black powder — "black mass" — that holds the nickel, cobalt, lithium and graphite worth recovering. Making black mass is easy ("low barrier to entry with low CAPEX investment and limited technology hurdles," per RECHARGE); refining it into battery-grade salts is hard and capital-intensive, and China holds most of that capacity (by "some estimates" reported in the Beveridge & Diamond analysis, "more than 85% of the worldwide refining capacity," of which "70-80% ... is currently idle"). Regulators have now written opposite rules for the same material. The EU's Commission Delegated Decision (EU) 2025/934 adds List of Wastes code 19 14 02 for the intermediate fraction from treating lithium batteries and classifies it as hazardous, so under the Waste Shipment Regulation "EU countries will be prohibited from sending black mass to non-OECD countries"; China, which had banned black-mass imports as hazardous waste for years, issued national standard GB/T 45203-2024 (effective 1 July 2025) and a June 2025 announcement under which black mass meeting compositional grades is non-waste and "can be imported freely (i.e., without any waste restrictions) into China from any other country that classifies the material as non-waste or non-hazardous" from 1 August 2025 — a route that will not cover EU-origin material once the EU code applies (the analysis adds that material classed as hazardous can still enter China under Basel prior-informed-consent rules, but not from OECD members that adhere to the Basel Ban Amendment, as the EU does); in the United States, EPA guidance treats black mass as generally a waste but non-hazardous if it passes the TCLP leaching test, which the analysis says it generally will unless the feedstock is contaminated. What the sources do not show is a shared technical basis: none of the three describes an internationally agreed physical definition, sampling protocol or assay standard for black mass — RECHARGE reports only that a classification proposal is under development with the Japanese battery association BASC — and RECHARGE notes that the powder's composition varies with cathode chemistry and with whether it comes from spent batteries or production waste. Among RECHARGE's asks is "a better and standardised definition of Black Mass."
Why this matters
Black mass is the strategic hinge of battery circularity: whoever refines it captures the critical minerals, and whoever cannot must import them again. Europe's recycling base "mainly consists of pre-processing operators; whereas post-treatment or 'refining' of Black Mass activities takes place outside the EU," so most European black mass "leaves EU to be refined elsewhere, mainly in South-East Asia." China's refiners, per industry sources cited by Fastmarkets, run at an average of "less than 50%" utilisation and need more input material; a Southeast Asian trader warned that the impurity limits in the draft of GB/T 45203 seen by Fastmarkets (copper ≤0.5 percent, aluminium ≤1 percent, moisture <2 percent, iron below 0.5 or 1 percent depending on grade) are "extremely strict ... It will be very hard for black mass from scrapped batteries to meet standards." Inside the EU, RECHARGE reports that an unclear regulatory framework is "resulting in delayed investment decisions," and that material counted as waste in one member state may be regarded as end-of-waste in another. At the global level, the Basel Convention parties agreed at COP-17 (April–May 2025) to prioritise negotiations on amendments to the annexes that define hazardous waste; final technical guidelines on battery waste are expected at COP-18 in April 2027, while the annex amendments "may require further negotiations." The EU's amended List of Wastes becomes mandatory on 9 November 2026.
What’s been tried and why it hasn’t worked
Each jurisdiction has solved the problem for itself. China's GB/T 45203-2024 is the first national specification: two types (Type 1 from nickel/cobalt chemistries in three grades by Ni+Co and Li content; Type 2 from LFP with >2 percent Li) with impurity caps on copper, aluminium and moisture common to all grades — but, as Fastmarkets describes the draft, it grades material by metal content and impurity limits (the article mentions no hazard criteria), and one trader quoted by Fastmarkets expects black mass from scrapped batteries to struggle to meet its thresholds. The EU has defined black mass by process origin (a code for the "intermediate fraction from the thermal and/or mechanical treatment of waste lithium-based batteries and lithium-based battery manufacturing waste containing a mixture of electrode materials") and by hazard, without a compositional specification, and its Battery Regulation delegated acts on recycling efficiency and material-recovery calculation — the rules that would define what counts as recycled — were, per RECHARGE, still to be issued "without further delay" in 2025. The United States relies on a leaching test, the TCLP, to decide whether black mass is hazardous. RECHARGE, describing the material, notes that black mass from batteries contains traces of solvents, electrolytes and organic compounds. Industry associations have weighed in — RECHARGE in Europe asks for a standardised definition, and, as RECHARGE reports, proposals are under discussion with the Japanese association BASC to sort black mass into technical categories by content, origin and level of treatment — but RECHARGE's ask is shaped by where its members want the material to flow: it wants a definition clear enough that "no BM inadvertently becomes classified as a product," so as to limit export from the EU, while some market participants, as Fastmarkets reports, expect China's standard to give clearer guidance on imports. The parties disagree on the goal — retain versus attract — and the sources describe no shared characterisation framework in force. Of the physical questions a shared specification would have to settle, the sources mention moisture only as a cap in China's draft standard and leachability only through the US TCLP; particle-size distribution, residual fluorine, reactivity and how the powder is to be sampled do not come up in them.
What would unlock progress
A jurisdiction-neutral characterisation and sampling standard for black mass — one that reports the hazard-relevant properties (reactivity, fluorine/HF potential, leachable metals, dust) and the value-relevant ones (Ni/Co/Li/graphite content, Cu/Al/Fe impurities) on the same certificate — would let each regulator apply its own policy to a shared measurement. Digital battery passports and the EU's forthcoming calculation methodologies could carry that certificate with the shipment. RECHARGE, writing about black mass being re-declared as a product and exported, says that "A standardized classification of BM developed on a global basis by industry associations could address some of the mentioned issues."
Entry points for student teams
A materials/analytical team could seek black-mass samples from a recycler or a university lab and develop a reproducible sampling-and-assay protocol for a segregating fine powder — testing how much reported Ni/Co/Li and impurity values swing with sampling method — and compare results against the GB/T 45203 grade thresholds and EU hazard criteria. A policy-design team could draft a mapping between the GB/T grades, the EU 19 14 02 hazard classification and the US TCLP outcome for the same characterised samples, showing exactly where the regimes disagree and whether a shared certificate could resolve it. An economics team could model the arbitrage and stranded-volume effects of the divergence for one recycler under the 2026 EU and 2025 China rules. Relevant skills: analytical chemistry, hazardous-materials regulation, trade law, techno-economic modelling.
Genes
Structural cousins: stuck the same way, in other fields
Sources
Goldberg, A.H., Hagen, P.E., Luo, W. (Beveridge & Diamond PC) (21 July 2025), "China and Europe Diverge on Classification of Black Mass from Recycling of Lithium-Ion Batteries," *National Law Review*, accessed 2026-08-18. Supplementary: RECHARGE (March 2025), "Fostering a resilient European battery value chain through closing the loop for battery materials: A Whitepaper on Black Mass," accessed 2026-08-18; Fastmarkets (14 January 2025), "China's first national standards for black mass could help open import market, sources say," accessed 2026-08-18. go to source 1 ↗ go to source 2 ↗ go to source 3 ↗
Working notes
Notes made while writing and checking this brief, shown as written. They use working shorthand.
Regulatory facts and quotations (Delegated Decision (EU) 2025/934 entered into force 19 June 2025; code 19 14 02; List of Wastes mandatory 9 November 2026; China's 10 June 2025 announcement and 1 August 2025 import opening; "85% of worldwide refining capacity ... 70-80% ... idle"; TCLP; Basel COP-17 dates and COP-18 expected April 2027) are from a WebFetch summary of the National Law Review article dated 21 July 2025 (the Beveridge & Diamond original returned HTTP 403); the verifier re-fetched the National Law Review page and restored the full China-import quotation, whose qualifier ("from any other country that classifies the material as non-waste or non-hazardous") had been truncated. GB/T 45203-2024 and its 1 July 2025 effective date come from the Fastmarkets article, not the National Law Review piece. GB/T 45203-2024 grade thresholds, the "less than 50%" utilisation figure and the trader quote are from a WebFetch summary of the Fastmarkets article; the standard itself was not read. RECHARGE quotations ("low barrier to entry"; "mainly consists of pre-processing operators"; "mainly in South-East Asia"; the standardised-definition ask; delegated acts "without further delay") are from the whitepaper PDF read in full. The reference to ReMA scrap specifications is the author's characterisation and was not verified this session; the physical-hazard list (lithium metal, fluorinated electrolyte, graphite dust) is general battery-recycling knowledge, not from the fetched sources. This is a regulatory-divergence problem, so `constraint:coordination` was explicitly tested and rejected on filter (1): the EU and China do not agree on the desired outcome (retain versus attract black mass), so it is not willing parties failing to coordinate — hence `constraint:regulatory` and `failure:regulatory-mismatch`. `constraint:supply-chain` is applied because refining capacity is concentrated in one geopolitical actor, which is what makes the classification consequential. `temporal:window` is a deadline window (EU List of Wastes mandatory Nov 2026; Basel COP-18 2027). `stakeholders:multi-institution` passes: the Commission, Chinese ministries, Basel parties and recyclers each own a non-substitutable piece. Related collection brief: `energy-lfp-battery-recycling-economics` (why LFP is uneconomic to recycle — a different, economic problem); this brief is the classification/specification gap for the intermediate product.
Source type: Observed (legal analysts and an industry association describing a regulatory divergence; the missing characterisation standard is the author's synthesis of their stated asks)
Verified at intake 2026-08-18: gate (net) + adversarial source check + contested-tag second coding.
Related briefs (distinct sub-problems, cross-referenced 2026-08-18): `energy-ev-battery-passport-state-of-health-measurement-gap`, `energy-lfp-battery-recycling-economics`.
Reconciliation 2026-10-01: Fact repair after reading the whole write-up against all three sources it names; a second reader went over the repairs on the same day, re-fetching all three sources, and this note describes the final state. All three were fetched directly on 2026-10-01 and read in full: the National Law Review article (https://natlawreview.com/article/china-and-europe-diverge-classification-black-mass-recycling-lithium-ion-batteries), the RECHARGE whitepaper (https://rechargebatteries.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/RECHARGE-Black-Mass-Whitepaper.pdf, 16 pages) and the Fastmarkets article (https://www.fastmarkets.com/insights/chinas-first-national-standards-for-black-mass-could-help-open-import-market/). (1) The long title said "Nobody Has Written the Physical Specification That Would Let Regulators Agree on What It Is." The sources show that specifications have been written or drafted (China's standard; a draft classification under discussion with the Japanese association BASC, which RECHARGE describes as "under development"), only not a shared one. The title now ends "No Shared Physical Specification Yet Exists That Would Let Regulators Agree on What It Is." The display title is unchanged. (2) The refining-capacity quotation was altered: the text had "85% of worldwide refining capacity"; the article says "According to some estimates, China has more than 85% of the worldwide refining capacity for black mass, and 70-80% of that capacity is currently idle." The quotation now matches and is marked as an estimate. (3) The quoted wording of EU waste code 19 14 02 was not the article's wording; it now carries the code text as the article quotes it. (4) The text said the United States classifies black mass as hazardous waste unless it passes the TCLP test. The article says EPA has indicated black mass is generally a waste but non-hazardous, and that it will generally pass the TCLP unless the feedstock is contaminated; the sentence now says that. (5) The text said China's "non-waste or non-hazardous" wording itself excludes EU material; the article adds that hazardous-classified material can still enter China under Basel consent rules, except from OECD members that adhere to the Ban Amendment, and the sentence now says that. The first reader had also replaced "under the Waste Shipment Regulation" as the basis of the EU export prohibition; the second reader restored it, because the article says the EU prohibited such shipments "through the EU Waste Shipment Regulation (WSR)" even before the Ban Amendment. (6) The standardised definition was called RECHARGE's "first ask"; in the whitepaper it follows the delegated-acts and recycling-efficiency items, so it is now "among RECHARGE's asks." (7) The statements that "there is no internationally shared physical definition, sampling protocol or assay standard" and that "no shared characterisation framework has been commissioned" are not made by any source. The text now says only that the three sources describe no such agreed standard, names the BASC proposal, and gives RECHARGE's description of how black-mass composition varies; the conclusion that the labels are applied to a powder "whose properties nobody measures the same way" was taken out. The list of unanswered physical questions now says which of them the sources do touch (moisture, as a cap in China's draft; leachability, through the TCLP) and which do not come up in them. (8) "Less than 50%" utilisation is given by Fastmarkets for refiners, as an average reported by industry sources; "recyclers" became "refiners." The impurity limits come from a draft of the standard seen by Fastmarkets, and the text now says so; iron is "less than" 0.5 or 1 percent. (9) Removed because no source contains them: the "thin, volatile market" in which a tonne is stranded or re-routed "depending on which customs officer reads which code"; black mass that "moves under conflicting paperwork or sits in warehouses"; that the standard is "written to admit refinable feedstock, not to assess hazard" and that its thresholds "exclude much real scrap-derived material" (now given as one trader's expectation, as Fastmarkets reports it, with the remark that the article mentions no hazard criteria); that the TCLP was "designed for landfill risk"; the list of lithium metal, fluorinated electrolyte residues and fine graphite; ReMA scrap specifications; that industry associations "have proposed definitions" (RECHARGE asks for one; the BASC proposals are under discussion); that "Chinese refiners want one loose enough to import" (now: some market participants, as Fastmarkets reports, expect the standard to give clearer guidance on imports); the comparison with ISO alloy specifications for steel scrap; the e-waste and copper-scrap precedent with ISRI/ReMA grades; that "several recyclers and universities hold" samples; and "H-codes." In their place the text uses what the sources say: RECHARGE on an unclear EU framework "resulting in delayed investment decisions" and on end-of-waste status varying between member states, on the traces of solvents, electrolytes and organic compounds in black mass, and its sentence that a standardized classification "could address some of the mentioned issues," which RECHARGE writes about black mass being re-declared as a product. (10) The text said a Basel decision on hazardous-waste scope was expected at COP-18. The article says final technical guidelines on battery waste are expected at COP-18 (April 2027), and that the annex amendments "may require further negotiations"; the sentence now follows the article. Confirmed in the sources and left as written: the Source line authors, titles and dates for the National Law Review and Fastmarkets articles, and the RECHARGE title; the RECHARGE quotations on low barrier to entry, pre-processing operators, South-East Asia, "without further delay" and "no BM inadvertently becomes classified as a product"; Delegated Decision (EU) 2025/934 and code 19 14 02; 9 November 2026; the 10 June 2025 announcement and 1 August 2025 opening; the full China-import quotation; GB/T 45203-2024 taking effect 1 July 2025; two types and three grades; LFP lithium above 2 percent; copper 0.5 percent, aluminium 1 percent, moisture 2 percent; the trader quotation; COP-17 dates. Not checked: GB/T 45203-2024 itself and the Commission Decision itself were not read, since the write-up cites them only through the three sources; the RECHARGE whitepaper's text carries no publication date, so "March 2025" rests on the PDF's creation date (17 March 2025) and upload path. The characterisation-standard proposal under "What Would Unlock Progress" and the student entry points are the write-up's own synthesis, as the Source type line says. The earlier notes above still mention ReMA and the lithium-metal hazard list, and the second tag note of 2026-08-18 quotes a sentence about converging physical descriptions; those passages are no longer in the write-up. Genome tags untouched.