It shows how battery circularity depends not only on technology, but on the way firms, regulators, platforms, communities, and infrastructure coordinate value.
Lithium-ion cells routinely outlast the products built around them. So why is there almost no industrial pathway to put them back to work?
Four structural failures recur across the literature. Together they describe a system that destroys value it has every reason to capture.
Twenty-two actors and eighty-six flows is the full canvas. Across the five governance models that follow, eleven actors recur — what changes is which value flows are activated, and who runs the table.
The orange-red cluster — Refurbisher, Recycler, Repairer — is the structural backbone. Three actors doing materially different things (rebuild to spec, reduce to elements, fix on the spot) but bound by the same governance question: who feeds them, who diagnoses, who buys.
Two arrows close the cycle: Recycler returning material back to Smelter and to the Cell mfr. Strip those out and the diagram is a tree, not a circular economy. The Grey market reseller is the structural rival to every legitimate path — the disvalue threat each archetype either contains or fails to.
30 included papers. Five archetypes. Each occupies a different corner of a single space, defined by who orchestrates and what value the orchestration is organised around.
Bubble area is proportional to paper count. Click any bubble to read the archetype's story.
Producer-led occupies the bottom-left because the OEM both orchestrates centrally and organises around commercial logic. Symbiosis sits to its right: still commercial, but distributed across firms in physical proximity. Regulation rises on the y-axis because it is institutionally framed. Community access rises and shifts right because it is institutionally framed and distributed across donors, NGOs, and civil-society actors.
The empty top-left quadrant (institutional and firm-hierarchical) is where state-owned-enterprise or industrial-policy-driven loops would live. The current sample includes none.
The OEM's closed loop · A Volvo XC40 Recharge, year seven.
The owner trades the car in. A clause in the lease returns the battery (still at 78% state of health) from the Vehicle dealer to a Volvo-controlled remanufacturing facility, where technicians using Battery cell mfr. instructions replace eight modules and re-certify it. It ships back out with a Volvo warranty into the next XC40.
Tier-1 suppliers feed material in. Battery recyclers take what is truly dead. A PRO (compliance) collects the fee. But the data, the residual value, and the customer all stay with the EV/auto OEM.
Routed by its passport · A Renault Zoe in Lyon.
The car’s BMS uploads its final state-of-health to a third-party platform like Circulor, or a service built on the EU Digital Product Passport. The platform doesn’t own the battery. It owns the routing.
A Diagnostics provider posts a verified SoH score. A Battery refurbisher bids for the pack on the platform’s marketplace. Hours later, modules are listed for sale; a small home-storage installer in Sweden picks them up. Before the sale, diagnostics supplies a compliance attestation to the buyer’s PRO (compliance). The Renault EV/auto OEM generated the original telematics, but the Ecosystem orchestrator is in control of the path.
The compliance chain · A German fleet pack via GRS Batterien.
In Germany, every producer that places a battery on the market is legally obliged to take it back. They don’t do this individually. They pay a fee to a PRO (compliance) like GRS Batterien, which discharges the obligation across hundreds of producers.
Ryan et al. (2025) make the compliance chain concrete in ebikes: circularity is not just collection, it is the struggle to make the legitimate route easier than the informal one. A fleet pack first becomes an obligation on paper. The PRO (compliance) converts that obligation into contracts, invoices, audits, and take-back capacity; a certified EoL collector books the pack into the official channel; a certified Battery recycler recovers cobalt, nickel, and lithium; and the evidence travels back as tonnage data before it becomes a compliance report to Government. Mayanti & Helo (2024) show why that reverse-logistics paperwork matters under EPR, while Rizos & Urban (2024), Kalimo & Mateo (2025), and Chaianong et al. (2024) show the same tension in policy terms: recycled-content targets and recovery economics only work when liability, traceability, and enforcement line up. The rival is the Grey-market reseller, who offers a simpler bargain: take the pack, move it offshore, capture the metal, avoid the fee. That is why Civil society / NGO is not merely watching from outside; it is watching whether the regulated route is credible enough to beat the free-rider route.
Five firms, five kilometres · The industrial park at Harjavalta, Finland.
Four firms inside a five-kilometre radius: a nickel smelter, a cobalt-sulphate plant, a precursor maker, and a planned cell-pack assembler. Add a Battery recycler at the edge and you have a closed loop made of pipes and short-haul trucks rather than ledgers.
A used pack arrives at the recycler. Black mass goes three kilometres by truck to the Smelter & refiner, which pipes battery-grade nickel and cobalt sulphate next door. The precursor plant reformulates active material; the Battery cell mfr. presses new cells. Reverse logistics is a service shared across all five firms, and knowledge from the Diagnostics provider travels openly because they’re not competing for the same downstream customer. The Infrastructure orchestrator who designed the park keeps the connections wired.
One battery, five solar pumps · Ebike packs to Lake Victoria.
A bicycle-battery wholesaler in Ireland processes returned ebike packs. Most cells still hold 70% of their original capacity. Too tired for a hill, but more than enough to power a borehole pump or run lights at night. A small Battery refurbisher rebuilds modules and ships them to a partner organisation in rural Tanzania.
A community energy provider (JUMEME, supported by a public-private partnership) installs the modules into solar-water systems for fishing villages on Lake Victoria. An Independent repairer trains village technicians; an Installer / maintainer commissions the install; a Civil society / NGO reports impact to international donors and Government for subsidies. The 2L end user is the village itself. Disvalue threats come from cheap Grey-market reseller modules dumped into the same markets, undercutting trust when they fail.
The model is a meta-synthesis of qualitative case studies, not a regulatory schema. What follows is for reviewers and engineering counterparts: what was coded, what was deferred, where the literature's vocabulary diverges from the regulation, and where the next coding pass will close gaps.
The model is a meta-synthesis of approximately twenty peer-reviewed case studies on battery circular-economy governance. Coding output: twenty-two actor roles organised in seven ecosystem groups; eighty-six directed value flows across ten value types in four families (profit and operations, institutional and informational, societal and environmental, disvalue and co-destruction); five governance archetypes. Theoretical anchors are Vargo and Lusch's Service-Dominant Logic and Verleye et al. on value co-creation and co-destruction.
What the diagram shows is what the literature describes, not what the regulation defines. The two are not the same.
EU Regulation 2024/1781 and the standard NBN EN 18061:2025 define a precise Re-X taxonomy. Remanufacturing requires module-level disassembly, restoration to at least 90% of original rated capacity, no more than 3% state-of-health variation between cells, and triggers a new conformity assessment and a new battery passport. Repair returns a defective battery to function without new homologation. Repurposing requires a different application from the original design, a new economic operator, and a new battery passport. Recycling is materials recovery.
The literature we synthesised uses these terms more loosely. "Refurbisher" in particular spans operations that the regulation would classify as remanufacturing and operations it would classify as repair. We chose to keep the literature's vocabulary. The terminological looseness is itself a finding about the field, and renaming actors to match the regulation would retrofit empirical observations to a normative framework. The bridge to the regulation is recorded as a planned per-case annotation in the next coding pass — each Re-X flow will carry a label identifying which regulation-defined operation the source study describes — not as a recoding of actor names.
The backbone tab on the interactive network, and the cast chapter that precedes the five archetypes, both render a minimal viable map — the smallest sub-network that survives a three-criterion filter. The criteria are: frequency invariance across the five archetypes (actors active in at least four of five lenses), ecosystem-group coverage (at least one actor per group), and value-family coverage (at least one flow per family). Connectivity is enforced by adding the minimum bridging actor when components separate.
Five actors qualify on invariance alone: Battery refurbisher, Battery recycler, Battery cell mfr., EV/auto OEM, Independent repairer. Six more are added by coverage: Smelter, Knowledge provider, Collector, Infrastructure orchestrator, Second-life customer, Grey-market reseller. Eleven actors and twenty directed flows. The method is data-driven rather than curated, but the choice of threshold and the priority order of the coverage criteria are themselves methodological commitments and are stated as such.
A working draft prepared as input to the Flanders Make CTO action on system-of-systems governance. Cite as: M. Hron, K. De Pourcq, R. Petrevska, L. Antonissen, K. Verleye, “Battery circular-economy ecosystem: a meta-synthesis,” Flanders Make @ Ghent University, 11 May 2026, www.hronmichal.net/battery-ecosystem.