Chinese company CATL has announced the creation of an international alliance to develop unified standards for the life cycle of traction batteries. The initiative was presented during London Climate Action Week and brought together major automakers and technology companies, including BMW, Renault, Volvo, Xiaomi, and Google.
The main goal of the project will be to create a Battery Circular Design Guide – a unified guide for designing batteries with their subsequent repair, reuse, and recycling in mind. The full version of the document is expected to be published in 2027.
The standard will define unified requirements for battery diagnostics, battery pack disassembly, reuse of individual components, and their restoration. The rules will apply to both passenger electric vehicles and commercial transport.
The alliance members will pay special attention to assessing the remaining life of batteries. It is planned to develop unified methods for analyzing battery operating history, degradation rate, and residual capacity. This will allow manufacturers, leasing companies, and fleet operators to more accurately assess battery costs and make decisions about their further use.
The project is coordinated by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, which specializes in developing circular economy principles and reducing the carbon footprint of industry.
According to CATL, the main volume of emissions during battery production comes not from component assembly, but from raw material extraction and processing. These processes account for approximately five times more carbon dioxide emissions than the direct production of batteries.
To reduce environmental impact, the company already actively uses secondary materials. Thanks to the use of recycled raw materials, the carbon footprint of materials has been reduced by 32%. In 2025, the subsidiary Brunp recycled about 210 thousand tons of used batteries, ensuring the extraction of 99.6% of key metals, including lithium, nickel, cobalt, and manganese.
In parallel, CATL continues to develop infrastructure outside of China. The company, together with British Octopus Energy, has begun creating a European network of fast battery swap stations for commercial transport. The project is based on technologies already tested in China, where a network of routes for heavy trucks with a replaceable battery system was previously deployed.
The company itself also continues to work on reducing emissions in production. Since 2022, CATL has implemented about 1000 energy efficiency improvement projects, thanks to which the intensity of emissions at its enterprises has decreased by 77%. As a result, all of the company's battery factories have already achieved carbon neutrality in their own production operations.
The new initiative should help create unified international rules for handling traction batteries and simplify compliance with environmental requirements in the global electric vehicle market.
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