BEYOND ZERO RECYCLING TECHNOLOGY CO., LTD.

Is climate change truly a product of the Industrial Revolution and capitalism? A simple “yes” risks overlooking the combined effects of energy structures, technological change, population growth, urbanization, global trade, consumption patterns, and policy institutions; a simple “no” fails to explain the historical fact that modern industrialization has massively increased resource extraction, fossil-fuel use, and greenhouse-gas emissions. This article argues that the more useful question is not “who is the sole culprit,” but rather: what kind of economic system have humans built that allows natural resources to be continuously extracted, processed, consumed, and then discharged back into the environment as waste? The lithium-ion battery is a highly concentrated example of exactly this system. From the extraction of lithium, nickel, cobalt, graphite, copper, and aluminum, through long-distance transport, refining, material synthesis, cell manufacturing, use, and performance decay, to eventual recycling or disposal — every stage carries costs in energy, carbon, water, land, biodiversity, chemicals, pollution, and safety. This article proposes a guiding principle: “circularity is not the goal; the environmental outcome is the goal.” A genuinely high-quality lithium-battery circular economy should place Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) at its core, integrating net carbon benefit, the volume of virgin material displaced, energy and water use, pollution load, material recovery rate and quality, the fate of residues, accident risk, traceability, and social governance into a single performance framework.

1. Where the Question Begins: Is Climate Change Really Caused by the Industrial Revolution and Capitalism?

The scientific evidence is clear. The IPCC has stated unequivocally that human activity — primarily through greenhouse-gas emissions — has caused global warming beyond doubt; global mean surface temperature in 2011–2020 was about 1.1°C higher than in 1850–1900. The IPCC also notes that responsibility for historical and current emissions is tied to energy use, land use, lifestyles, and the differing production and consumption patterns of various regions and groups. [1] It is therefore imprecise to pin climate change on the single word “capitalism” — but it is equally inconsistent with the evidence to separate today’s climate crisis from industrialization, fossil energy, and a high-throughput economic system.

A more complete way to understand the problem is to break it into three layers. The first is “energy technology”: coal, oil, and natural gas gave humanity an unprecedented density of energy and productive capacity. The second is “industrial and market institutions”: industrialization pushed production from local scales to global supply chains, lowering the cost of goods and expanding consumption. The third is “governance of externalities”: the atmosphere, rivers, oceans, biodiversity, and mineral resources were never easily priced into goods, so part of the environmental cost has been shifted onto the public sector, local communities, future generations, and other species.

UNEP’s Global Resources Outlook 2024 finds that natural-resource extraction has roughly tripled over the past fifty years, and that without a transition, extraction could rise by a further 60% by 2060 relative to 2020. This shows that today’s environmental crisis cannot be understood as a carbon problem alone — it must be addressed together with resource consumption, biodiversity loss, and pollution and waste, the “triple planetary crisis.” [2]

What this article ultimately asks, then, is not “is capitalism guilty,” but: can a linear system built on “extraction → manufacturing → consumption → disposal” keep expanding indefinitely on a finite planet? If the answer is no, then what the circular economy truly needs to redesign is not merely the waste-treatment end, but the design of the entire value chain.

2. Why Is the Lithium-Ion Battery the Most Worthwhile Case to Examine?

Lithium-ion batteries are seen as a key technology for the energy transition, because they can store electricity in mobile or stationary systems, supporting electric vehicles, renewable-energy storage, consumer electronics, and grid balancing. But “using a battery” and “producing a battery” are two very different environmental problems. The IEA notes that lithium demand grew nearly 30% in 2024, and that the energy sector is now the main driver of growth in demand for battery minerals such as lithium, nickel, cobalt, and graphite. [3]

More importantly, a battery is a highly material-intensive product. Its value comes not only from cell manufacturing but from upstream mining and chemical materials: lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese, graphite, as well as copper, aluminum, steel, electrolyte, and separator film. This gives the lithium battery’s environmental footprint a “multi-stage, multi-country, multi-material” character.

The true environmental account of a battery, therefore, should not be written simply as “no tailpipe emissions during use.” It should be a full lifecycle profit-and-loss statement:

3. The Real Environmental Question: Not “Whether Recycling Happens” but “What Recycling Actually Improves”

This is where the lithium-battery recycling industry is most easily misunderstood. Recycling is not accomplished simply by turning “spent batteries” into “black mass.” The real task is to prove that the recovered material can reliably re-enter the economic system and, at the scale of the full lifecycle, genuinely reduce demand on virgin resources and the environment. IEA research finds that, on average, the greenhouse-gas emissions of energy-transition minerals obtained through recycling — such as lithium, nickel, and cobalt — can be roughly 80% lower than those obtained through mining virgin material; by 2040, expanded recycling could reduce the need for new mine development. [4][5]

But “recycling can lower environmental burden” does not mean “all recycling methods are equally good.” Different chemistries, electricity sources, pre-treatment methods, metallurgical routes, and end uses all change the LCA outcome. A 2026 study comparing pyrometallurgy, hydrometallurgy, and direct recycling across NCA, NMC, and LFP battery chemistries found clear differences in climate and other environmental impacts among the routes; a 2024 systematic literature review likewise found that LIB-recycling results vary widely depending on system boundaries, functional units, electricity sources, chemical inputs, and assumptions about how much virgin product is displaced. [6][7]

In other words, government should not judge the industry only on “tonnes processed per year,” and operators should not rest their case on claiming “95% or 99% metal recovery.” The questions that actually matter are: how much energy and water does processing one tonne of batteries consume? How much greenhouse gas is emitted? How much wastewater and hazardous residue is generated? And at what quality, and in what quantity, can the recovered lithium, nickel, cobalt, copper, and aluminum actually displace virgin material? These are the real scorecard of the circular economy.

4. How to Quantify: Building a “Circular Battery Environmental Performance” Framework Instead of Counting Recycled Weight Alone

Government, battery manufacturers, recycling operators, and downstream customers should progressively adopt a shared “Circular Battery Environmental Performance (CBEP)” framework. This does not replace ISO 14040/14044 or existing regulation — it translates them into management indicators the industry can compare against one another. The EU Battery Regulation already builds lifecycle carbon footprint into its management framework, requiring certain battery types to express their carbon footprint in kg CO2e per kWh of total energy the battery is expected to deliver over its lifetime, with raw-material acquisition, manufacturing, distribution, and end-of-life all included within the system boundary. [8] Taiwan would do well to draw on this approach.

The single most important concept here is “net environmental benefit.” In simplified form, the climate performance of a recycling system can be understood as:

Net carbon benefit ≈ Emissions avoided from virgin-material production − Lifecycle emissions of the recycling system itself

This equation is only a conceptual model. A real LCA must handle system boundaries, substitution rates, allocation methods, grid emission factors, co-products, byproducts, and data quality, and must avoid double counting. In particular, “recovering 1 kg of nickel” cannot simply be equated with “avoiding all the emissions of producing 1 kg of virgin nickel” — there must be evidence for exactly which virgin product the recycled nickel displaced, and at what quality and ratio.

5. A Decline in Battery “Health” Does Not Mean the Battery Has Lost All Its Value

Another important issue: “retirement” and “scrapping” should not be treated as synonyms. When a battery’s capacity and power performance decline with cycling and time, it does not necessarily lose all function immediately. If the battery’s safety, remaining capacity, and internal resistance permit, repair, reassembly, second-life use, or remanufacturing should be evaluated before the battery moves on to material recycling. This ordering follows the basic logic of the circular economy: extend the functional life of an existing product as far as possible, and only then break the material back down into its elements or raw inputs.

The EU’s 2023/1542 Battery Regulation formalizes the Battery Passport system, requiring that, from 18 February 2027, certain light-transport vehicles, industrial batteries above 2 kWh, and electric-vehicle batteries carry an electronic record. Its content includes battery status, State of Health (SOH), cycle count, usage environment, and incident history, providing the data needed for repair, remanufacturing, second-life use, and recycling. [9] This means the recycling industry of the future will not just be a “material-processing plant” — it will increasingly become a node for “battery data governance and material recovery.”

Future recyclers, then, should be able to classify each batch of batteries by chemistry, origin, SOH, incident history, and material composition, and then determine the optimal path for each: reuse, second-life application, remanufacturing, direct material recovery, hydrometallurgy, pyrometallurgy, or other technologies. This is far closer to genuine circularity than simply shredding everything into black mass.

6. What Makes a High-Quality Lithium Battery Recycling Operator?

To let the market distinguish between “compliant” and “high-quality” operators, a three-tier standard can be established. The first tier is legal compliance: lawful land use, permits, environmental and safety facilities, reporting, transport, and hazardous-material management. The second tier is engineering performance: stable processing capacity, equipment controls, batch quality, recovery rates, and accident prevention. The third tier is environmental performance: the ability to prove, through third-party-verified LCA, carbon emissions, water use, pollution, resource substitution, and residue disposition, that the operator’s processing genuinely reduces environmental burden.

This third tier should become the core of future industry competition. A company can be legally compliant and well equipped, and still produce poor environmental outcomes because of energy intensity, excessive chemical use, poor residue management, or low-quality recycled product. Conversely, an operator that can consistently deliver low-energy, low-emission, high-recovery, high-purity, low-pollution, and traceable recycled material is the one that genuinely embodies the value of “green manufacturing.”

7. How Government Should Treat Existing and New Recycling Operators: From “Licensing” to “Performance Governance”

Taiwan is currently at an institutional turning point. The Resource Circulation Promotion Act, promulgated on 17 June 2026, has renamed and substantively revised the former Resource Recycling and Reuse Act, explicitly listing the conservation of natural resources, waste reduction, lower environmental burden, and the building of a circular society as its objectives, and incorporating lifecycle thinking, circular products, information disclosure, and circular markets into its institutional direction; certain provisions, as specified by law, take effect on 17 June 2028. [10][11]

Under the current system, Taiwan’s Ministry of Environment has already established registration and management, facility standards, and audit/certification mechanisms for recycling and treatment operators, and supports related recovery, removal, treatment, and management work through the Resource Recycling Management Fund. [12] This is a solid foundation, but the next phase should further redirect subsidies and regulatory resources toward “environmental outcomes.”

A five-tier regulatory framework is proposed:

The “reward” here should not be a one-off certificate; it should form an actual economic incentive. For example, recycling/removal/treatment subsidies could be progressively linked to “effective material recovery volume,” “quality of recycled product,” “net environmental benefit,” and “third-party verification,” so that high-quality operators receive genuinely better operating conditions rather than all operators of similar throughput receiving similar treatment.

At the same time, operators that already hold treatment permits should not be re-evaluated with a single blunt cutoff. Instead, a process of “baseline performance assessment of existing facilities + a reasonable transition period + tiered improvement” should be established. The goal is not to force legally operating companies out of the market, but to require them to keep pace with new environmental standards. This is consistent with the lifecycle- and circularity-oriented emphasis of the 2026 Resource Circulation Promotion Act. [10]

8. How Regulation Should Be Improved: Elevating “Waste Treatment” to “Material Flow Management”

Future regulation can evolve along five lines:

1. Build a digital battery-material record: including, at minimum, chemistry, origin, weight, SOH, incident/thermal-event history, disassembly and disposition, and the weight and quality of recovered product.
2. Distinguish between “resource recovery rate” and “material circularity rate”: recovery rate measures how much is collected back; material circularity rate measures the share that genuinely re-enters qualified products.
3. Build environmental performance into permit renewal: permits should assess not only capacity and equipment, but also the past three years’ record on energy, water, emissions, incidents, residues, and recycled-product performance.
4. Introduce third-party verification: allow LCA results, carbon footprint, metal recovery rates, and recycled-product quality to be sample-audited, reducing the information asymmetry created by companies’ self-reported claims.
5. Establish “payment for environmental outcomes”: subsidies should reward outcomes that genuinely displace virgin material and reduce carbon and pollution — not simply reward sending more spent batteries into a plant.

Taiwan’s new law is already moving toward information disclosure and a circularity mark. Existing provisions also propose that designated products may be required to disclose material and recycled-content ratios, repairability, durability, disassembly method, and — where a unique identifier exists — traceability of product flow and quality-verification information. [13] Lithium batteries are therefore well placed to become one of the flagship demonstration industries for this new system.

9. Government Cannot Regulate Recyclers Alone — Upstream Design Must Also Bear Responsibility

If all responsibility is placed on the recycling and treatment plant, the system is incomplete. A battery’s recyclability, ease of disassembly, degree of material mixing, adhesive method, chemistry labeling, Battery Management System (BMS) data, and parts availability are, in large part, decided at the product-design stage. If a product is inherently difficult to take apart, test, and sort, even the most advanced end-of-life recycling can only respond passively.

Government should therefore progressively build a shared “design — manufacture — use — recycle” responsibility model: manufacturers responsible for disassembly and material labeling; users and operators responsible for complete usage data; recyclers responsible for safety and material recovery; downstream material buyers responsible for verifying recycled material; and government responsible for establishing shared rules and a data platform. This is also the key lesson of the EU Battery Regulation, which links carbon footprint, recycled-content requirements, the Battery Passport, and recycling requirements within a single system. [8][9]

10. How Recyclers Can Be “Seen” by Society: From Waste Handlers to Green Miners and Material Suppliers

Public understanding of lithium-battery recycling today still tends to stop at “disposing of dangerous spent batteries.” But from a resource-economics perspective, a high-quality recycling plant is actually engaged in “urban mining” and recycled-material manufacturing. The IEA treats expanded recycling as one of the strategies for reducing the need for new mine development and strengthening the resilience of critical-mineral supply. [4]

Industry communication should therefore shift from “how many tonnes of spent batteries we process per day” to “how much virgin-mineral demand we avoid each year, how much qualified recycled material we supply, how much carbon we reduce, how much water we save, and how much material we genuinely bring back into the supply chain.”

What most deserves to be understood by society is not even the word “recycling” itself, but “the second life of materials.” A kilogram of high-purity recycled nickel, cobalt, lithium, copper, or aluminum is not simply waste turned into a commodity — it converts a portion of what would otherwise require fresh mining, transport, refining, and processing into the reuse of material that already exists. This is where the circular economy becomes genuinely meaningful for climate and resource security.

11. The Future of This Industry: Perhaps Not Just “Black Mass,” but a Circular Infrastructure for Materials and Data

The lithium-battery recycling industry could develop along six future directions:

Academic research is also signaling to industry that comparing CO2 alone is no longer sufficient. Lifecycle studies should incorporate acidification, eutrophication, toxicity, resource depletion, and water impacts, and should improve the quality of primary, industrial-scale data. [6][7] This points directly to the next stage of industry upgrading in education: the recycling engineers of the future cannot rely on chemistry and mechanical skills alone — they will also need LCA, carbon management, data analysis, hazard assessment, supply-chain, and policy expertise.

12. Education and Talent: Cultivating “Circular Engineers,” Not Just “Recycling Operators”」

If the circular economy is the next industrial stage, the education system must also move from single-discipline training toward cross-disciplinary talent. Universities, technical colleges, and corporate training programs could establish “circular materials engineering” curricula covering: battery chemistry, mechanical disassembly, safety management, hydrometallurgical/pyrometallurgical/direct recycling, LCA, carbon footprinting, industrial data, AI, quality management, dangerous-goods transport, environmental regulation, and circular business models.

Just as important, public education should convey that returning a battery correctly is only the first step of circularity — the real challenge is whether the back end can bring materials safely, at low carbon, and at high purity, back into industry. If the public, business, and government can all come to understand recycling through this lens, a treatment plant will no longer be seen as “waste’s last stop,” but as “a new starting point for resources.”

13. Starting From the Lithium Battery: Redefining “Progress”

The Industrial Revolution gave humanity unprecedented productive capacity, and capital markets provided the mechanism to rapidly diffuse innovation, technology, and mass production. The problem is not that humanity should not have progressed — it is that past progress has generally placed “increasing output, lowering cost, and expanding consumption” first, while pushing the finitude of natural resources and environmental externalities to the very back.

What genuinely needs reform, then, may not be the name of any particular economic system, but the way we measure value. If GDP growth can come from ever-higher resource throughput, ever-larger pollution-control costs, and ever-faster resource depletion — and if these costs are not fully reflected — then “economic growth” and “social welfare” will not necessarily move together. Conversely, if we can make products more durable, batteries easier to repair and disassemble, energy lower-carbon, and materials more efficiently circulated, with recycled materials carrying credible quality and market pricing, then economic activity itself can become a tool for environmental improvement.

This is the true challenge of the circular economy: not to polish up the final stage of the linear economy — waste treatment — but to redesign the entire value chain, so that “being discarded” becomes an ever-shrinking exception rather than the default outcome of the production system.

14. Conclusion: What the Circular Economy Should Ultimately Protect Is the “Earth System,” Not “Recycling Numbers”

When we ask whether the Industrial Revolution and capitalism are the main culprits behind today’s climate change, the more important answer may be this: they are the historical structures that built the modern system of mass production and high-carbon energy — but today’s problem is no longer about finding a single entity to blame. It is about how to redirect human productive capacity toward a system that stays within the carrying capacity of the planet.

The lithium battery happens to be a mirror. It can represent the energy transition — or it can represent a new set of problems in mining, material processing, global logistics, and waste. If we call electric vehicles and energy storage “green” while refusing to confront upstream mining, process energy, chemicals, battery lifespan, and end-of-life treatment, then “green” is simply the linear economy repainted in a different color.

The standard for the next generation of the circular economy should therefore be very simple: not “how much was recycled,” but — under safe and verifiable conditions — how much new resource extraction, how much energy consumption, how much pollution, and how much greenhouse gas has genuinely been avoided for the planet.

When government moves from permit management to performance management, when industry moves from competing on tonnage to competing on environmental outcomes, when consumers move from “throwing away” to “extending use and recycling correctly,” and when education moves from single-discipline technical training to cross-disciplinary circular engineering — only then will the lithium-battery recycling industry have a genuine chance to become the “green infrastructure” of the next industrial system.

15. Ten Action Recommendations for Government, Industry, and Society

1. IPCC (2023), Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report, Summary for Policymakers / Headline Statements. https://report.ipcc.ch/ar6syr/headline.html
2. UNEP / International Resource Panel (2024), Global Resources Outlook 2024: Bend the Trend. https://www.unep.org/resources/Global-Resource-Outlook-2024
3. International Energy Agency (IEA) (2025), Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2025; Lithium. https://www.iea.org/reports/global-critical-minerals-outlook-2025
4. IEA (2025), Recycling of Critical Minerals — Executive Summary. https://www.iea.org/reports/recycling-of-critical-minerals/executive-summary
5. IEA (2025), Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2025 — Overview of Outlook for Key Minerals. https://www.iea.org/reports/global-critical-minerals-outlook-2025/overview-of-outlook-for-key-minerals
6. Peixoto, T., Di Persio, F., Agostini, A. (2026), Lithium-ion battery recycling routes: An environmental assessment in the context of the European battery regulation. Sustainable Chemistry for the Environment, 13, 100306. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scenv.2025.100306
7. Review of life cycle assessment on lithium-ion batteries recycling (2024), systematic review of 64 peer-reviewed LCA studies. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2949823624000096
8. European Union (2023; consolidated text 2025), Regulation (EU) 2023/1542 concerning batteries and waste batteries, Article 7 / Annex II. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32023R1542
9. European Union (2023), Regulation (EU) 2023/1542, Article 77 — Digital battery passport. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2023/1542/oj
10. Taiwan Ministry of Environment, “Resource Circulation Promotion Act,” amended and promulgated 17 June 2026; certain provisions (e.g. Article 14 and Article 38, paragraph 1) take effect on their statutory dates, with the remainder effective from the date of promulgation. https://oaout.moenv.gov.tw/law/LawContent.aspx?id=FL015724
11. Taiwan Ministry of Environment, “President promulgates renaming of the ‘Resource Recycling and Reuse Act’ to the ‘Resource Circulation Promotion Act’ and amends its provisions,” 23 June 2026. https://wdms.moenv.gov.tw/idms/newsitem.aspx?k=7DA2E1BE748B053EB8AEAC013559C90A
12. Taiwan Ministry of Environment Resource Recycling Network, “Fund Introduction,” describing management of recycling/treatment operators, audit and certification oversight, and the Resource Recycling Management Fund. https://recycle.moenv.gov.tw/Introduction/FundIntroduction
13. Taiwan Ministry of Environment, “Resource Circulation Promotion Act,” Articles 21–23 et seq., concerning the circularity mark, information disclosure, and labeling. https://oaout.moenv.gov.tw/law/LawContent.aspx?id=FL015724
14. US EPA (2026), Battery Collection Best Practices. https://www.epa.gov/electronics-batteries-management/battery-collection-best-practices
15. Rinne, M., Lappalainen, H., Lundström, M. (2025), Evaluating the possibilities and limitations of pyrometallurgical recycling of waste Li-ion batteries using simulation and life cycle assessment. Green Chemistry. https://doi.org/10.1039/D4GC05409A
16. Life Cycle Assessment of Lithium-Ion Battery Recycling: Evaluating the Impact of Recycling Methods and Location (2025), Environmental Science & Technology. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.4c13838
17. [17] Costs, carbon footprint, and environmental impacts of lithium-ion batteries — from cathode active material synthesis to cell manufacturing and recycling (2023), Applied Energy. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apenergy.2023.122132