one powder, two passports

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 ("85% of worldwide refining capacity," of which "70-80% ... currently idle," per the Beveridge & Diamond analysis). 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 qualifier that itself excludes EU-origin material once the EU code applies; the United States classifies it as hazardous waste unless it passes the TCLP leaching test. Beneath the policy fight lies a technical vacuum: there is no internationally shared physical definition, sampling protocol or assay standard for black mass, so "hazardous" and "raw material" are being applied to a heterogeneous powder whose properties nobody measures the same way. RECHARGE's own first ask 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 recyclers, per Fastmarkets, run at "less than 50%" utilisation and want feedstock; a Southeast Asian trader warned that GB/T 45203's impurity limits (copper ≤0.5 percent, aluminium ≤1 percent, moisture <2 percent, iron ≤0.5–1 percent depending on grade) are "extremely strict ... It will be very hard for black mass from scrapped batteries to meet standards." The result is a thin, volatile market in which the same tonne can be stranded, re-graded or re-routed depending on which customs officer reads which code, recyclers cannot plan refining investments, and the Basel Convention parties agreed at COP-17 (April–May 2025) to prioritise negotiations on hazardous-waste scope with a decision expected at COP-18 in 2027. The EU's amended List of Wastes becomes mandatory on 9 November 2026. In the meantime black mass moves under conflicting paperwork or sits in warehouses.

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 universal impurity caps — but it is written to admit refinable feedstock, not to assess hazard, and its thresholds exclude much real scrap-derived material. The EU has defined black mass by process origin (a code for "the intermediate fraction from thermal/mechanical treatment of waste lithium-based batteries") 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 designed for landfill risk, not for a reactive powder that may contain lithium metal, fluorinated electrolyte residues and fine graphite. Industry associations (RECHARGE, and in the US ReMA's scrap specifications) have proposed definitions, but each is shaped by where its members want the material to flow: European producers want a definition strict enough that "no BM inadvertently becomes classified as a product," Chinese refiners want one loose enough to import. Because the parties disagree on the goal — retain versus attract — no shared characterisation framework has been commissioned, and the physical questions (particle-size distribution, residual electrolyte and fluorine, moisture and reactivity, heavy-metal leachability, sampling of a segregating powder) go unanswered in the regulatory texts.

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, the way ISO alloy specifications let steel scrap trade under different national waste rules. Digital battery passports and the EU's forthcoming calculation methodologies could carry that certificate with the shipment. The adjacent precedent is e-waste and copper-bearing scrap, where Basel technical guidelines and industry specifications (ISRI/ReMA grades) coexist: policy divergence remained, but the physical descriptions converged enough for shipments to be adjudicated consistently.

Entry points for student teams

A materials/analytical team could obtain black-mass samples (several recyclers and universities hold them) 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 (H-codes for reactivity, toxicity, leaching). 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.