What you need to know about Chinese car brands
11 March 2026
From BYD to GWM, we investigate the increasing number of Chinese car brands on New Zealand roads.
What happens to EV batteries at the end of their life?
We investigate the problems and opportunities for EV battery recycling in New Zealand.
What happens to Hybrid and EV batteries at the end of their life? What about if a battery is compromised in an accident? Are there regulations for dealing with the potentially hazardous materials that make up these batteries?
While traditional lead acid car batteries can be 99% recycled in New Zealand, this is not the case for EV and Hybrid batteries which are made from different materials. So, as the number of EVs and Hybrids on New Zealand roads continues to increase, so too does the problem of safely and responsibly handling batteries.
What currently happens to old EV batteries in New Zealand?
While a battery’s lifespan is impacted by many variables, including how and how often a vehicle is driven, it has been commonly accepted that most EV batteries will last for around a decade.
In New Zealand, the average age of a car is nearly 15 years. In Japan, most drivers only keep their vehicles for five years, so at the end of those five years the car still has a significant lifespan. New Zealand is a key market for importing these used vehicles.
But because our vehicle fleet is comprised of many ageing Japanese imports there’s a growing problem of what to do with depleted nickel-metal hydride batteries; currently there are no official guidelines for what should happen to them at the end of their life.
Once an EV battery has lost about 30% of its capacity it is no longer suitable for powering a vehicle, but it could be used for other second-life applications, such as energy storage systems for solar power.
Phoenix Recycling in Auckland deals with many types of batteries, but as Jasmine Faulkner, Phoenix’s GM of Sustainability and Product Stewardship points out, when it comes to EV batteries, re-use is very ambiguous. “Until we can really connect with all OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers), we can’t understand their re-use position. Some OEMs don’t want their batteries re-used (for other things) because it’s their intellectual property. If the battery is not going to be used in its primary application, then they require it to be sent for destruction or recycling.”
New Zealand has a number of specialist facilities for processing different battery compositions, like Phoenix, but most are not yet ready to process large volumes of EV batteries.
The problem with lithium batteries
As technology evolves, the changing composition of batteries raises other issues.
“Nickel-metal hydride batteries were used in vehicles manufactured between 2000-2016,” explains Dominic Salmon, Project Manager, Battery Industry Group (ASNZ). “But today, the standard BEV or Hybrid battery has lithium-based chemistry.
“If you look at the transition from vinyl to tape to CDs to digital, we’re essentially doing the same thing with battery technology, but at pace,” he says.
Unlike the relatively benign components of nickel-metal hydride batteries, damaged lithium-ion batteries can pose significant safety risks. Even if the vehicle is new and the battery has plenty of lifespan left, if it is compromised in an accident the battery needs to be safely disposed of.
“When a lithium battery is compromised, it cannot be shipped overseas for recycling due to the safety risk,” Jasmine Faulkner says. “As a business, we cannot find any means to dispose of a battery that is larger than a 200-litre drum. Furthermore, if a vehicle is in an accident, we honestly don’t know what happens to those batteries. They sit in limbo, or they ‘disappear’.”
“There is a lot of rhetoric around the fire risk of lithium batteries,” Dominic Salmon adds. “Much of that pertains to smaller e-scooter or household appliance batteries. However, EV fires tend to attract disproportionate media attention. An EV is approximately 20 times less likely to catch fire than an internal combustion engine vehicle, but the fact is that when lithium-ion burns, it really does burn.”
Tom Ronaldson, Community Education and Behaviour Change Manager for Fire Emergency New Zealand concurs that in specific situations, compromised lithium-ion batteries can cause big problems.
Jasmine Faulkner, GM of Sustainability and Product Stewardship at Phoenix Recycling.
“There was an incident when a Hybrid vehicle ended up in the ocean,” Tom says. “Some good Samaritans pulled it out with a tractor and then the battery went into thermal runaway, which is what happens when lithium-ion batteries catch fire. It's like a merry-go-round of heat being produced; they can reach temperatures of more than 1,000°C. A volunteer brigade put the fire out about three or four times before they realised that it was going to keep reigniting. Eventually, because there were no exposure risks, they just let it burn. It took about six hours to burn out.
“We estimate that it takes about 10,000 litres of water to put out an EV fire. The average fire truck holds around 1,500 litres.”
While this situation may sound alarming, Tom re-iterates that instances of lithium-ion battery fires are extremely rare. However, when they are exposed to water, or the cells inside are damaged, that increases the risk of them going into thermal runaway.
How can large lithium batteries be dealt with in New Zealand?
“Right now, we have the opportunity, as very small country, to get a solution in place for dealing with large batteries before it becomes a problem,” Dominic Salmon says.
Dominic Salmon, Project Manager, Battery Industry Group (ASNZ)
The Battery Industry Group (B.I.G) launched in 2020. “B.I.G represents the whole lifecycle of the battery,” Dominic continues. “This includes the energy sector, research sector, VIA (Motor Vehicle Industry Association), EECA (Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority), the AA, manufacturers and recyclers, with the aim of designing a product stewardship scheme for large batteries over 5kg. For us, it’s a case of looking at what is working overseas and bringing that into a New Zealand context.”
The ideal, from a recycling perspective, would be to get a large enough volume of lithium batteries to make it commercially viable to process them here, Jasmine Faulkner says.
“No entity in New Zealand has resource consent to process them, but we are working hard to get the level of feedstock to justify an onshore facility.
“Plus, lithium-ion batteries can cost anything from $3,000 to $8,000 per tonne to recycle,” Jasmine continues. “Consumers don’t know that. No-one is asking, ‘what is the end-of-life plan for my vehicle?’ when they purchase it. It’s not something that’s front of mind.
“In the absence of a mandated product stewardship scheme, we would like all importers to be able to prove they have a sound end-of-life plan. Batteries should not be allowed to enter New Zealand without one. Right now, they don’t have to do that, so it becomes the metal recyclers’ problem or the wreckers’ problem.”
But battery recycling should not become the consumer’s problem either. “The B.I.G design would see a solution for all large batteries that doesn’t burden the consumer,” Dominic Salmon says. “Ultimately it must be an industry-led solution that has a really good sustainable outcome.
“B.I.G has submitted an application for accreditation for large batteries (Priority Product – Waste Act) to The Ministry for the Environment and is currently working through the feedback that has been received on the scheme design.”
New Zealand has a choice between waiting for regulation or taking action. “At B.I.G we believe the time to act is now,” Dominic continues. “We can refer to what’s working overseas and adapt that for New Zealand. The wave of batteries is coming, but with a well-planned stewardship scheme we can a design a circular system to feed valuable second-life markets and safely recover critical materials in a sustainable way.”
Toyota New Zealand's battery recycling programme
Toyota is undoubtedly one of the most popular car brands in New Zealand. One in four vehicles on our roads is a Toyota, many of which have been imported second-hand from Japan by dealers or private buyers, and many of these are Hybrid vehicles with nickel-metal hydride batteries that are now reaching the end of their life.
“Even though we (at Toyota New Zealand) didn’t import most of the older, second-hand EVs from Japan, we still have a corporate responsibility to ensure those batteries are recycled properly and not just buried in the ground,” says Paul Bowness, Toyota New Zealand Sales Manager.
In the absence of a comprehensive recycling programme in New Zealand, Toyota New Zealand has begun to send all their nickel-metal hydride battery packs to Phoenix Recycling. “We dismantle them, pulling them apart to cell level, then we aggregate the cells and when we’ve got enough for a shipment, we export them to Toyota Tsusho in Japan,” Jasmine Faulkner says.
“It's very early in the piece, so we don’t quite know what the volumes are going to be, but we’ve already sent one container.”
Once the Toyota batteries get to Japan, they can be re-manufactured if they are in suitable condition. While this remanufacturing does also happen in New Zealand and Australia, it poses challenges and risks because of the lack of regulation or best practice guidelines.
“We really value Toyota New Zealand’s leadership in this space; they’re setting a great example of what can be achieved with well-designed end-of-life plans,” Jasmine Faulkner says.
“It doesn’t matter who brought the vehicle in or where the battery is, we’ll take responsibility for ensuring it is recycled properly and goes back to Japan,” Paul Bowness adds.
This story is from the Autumn 2026 issue of AA Directions magazine.
