This is the final episode of a five-part series exploring the lithium-ion battery supply chain. If you haven’t listened to the first four episodes, we recommend you start there.

So far over this season we've traced the global lithium-ion battery supply chain from mining to processing to manufacturing. And we've put it all into a geopolitical and economic context.

In this final installment of our five-part series, we come to the end of the road for a battery.

There are a lot of technical innovations on the horizon when it comes to battery recycling. But are we anywhere close to making the battery economy actually circular?

When you get rid of your car, there is a profitable industry that takes responsibility for the components inside of it. And that's because we've had many, many decades to perfect this process -- and develop efficient supply chains. The modern battery supply chain is still a work in progress.

In this episode, we’ll visit a recycling facility, learn how battery recyclers are evolving into battery component manufacturers, navigate the complexities of turning dead batteries into new ones, and explore the concept of circularity.

This is the fourth episode of a five-part series exploring the lithium-ion battery supply chain. If you haven’t listened to the first three episodes, we recommend you start there.

China has been the world's biggest battery manufacturer for over a decade. Chinese companies got in the game early, building an industry from scratch in the 2000s. By 2022, according to the IEA, China manufactured 76% of the world's batteries.

But that’s changing. Battery factories in the U.S. and around the world are running 24/7 to churn out millions of cells – thanks to growing demand for storage all over the world, and government support for local manufacturing.

In this episode, we’re exploring the rapid buildout of factories to support the battery economy. We’ll tour a lithium-ion battery factory in upstate NY to see how batteries are made at scale. And we ask where a small US factory fits into a global battery market dominated by China.

This is the third episode of a five-part series exploring the lithium-ion battery supply chain. If you haven’t listened to the first two episodes, we recommend you start there.

Batteries can replace gasoline in our cars, or diesel in our generators, with electricity. But batteries and petroleum-based fuels share something in common: they both rely on energy-intensive processes to turn extracted materials into something useful.

The middle stage of the lithium-ion supply chain is called processing – and it's a critical one. To make lots of affordable batteries, we have to process a lot of materials. It’s a big, lucrative business with real impacts to local communities and the environment.

In this episode, we dig into step two of the supply chain: processing all those minerals into usable ingredients for batteries.

Why are countries so keen on building giant processing facilities? And can we process all the minerals we need to fight climate change in a responsible way?