Battery waste. Pile of old used EV car batteries toxic waste chemicals lead leak impact nature no recycled.
Walk through any mall in Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok or Jakarta and the future of consumption gleams back through glass. Smartphones are replaced annually, electric scooters are on every corner, and cars carry charging ports instead of exhaust pipes.
South-East Asia is electrifying and modernising at extraordinary speed. Yet behind the shine of progress sits a question that policymakers should pay more attention to: What happens when all of this needs to be thrown away?
Governments today celebrate cleaner transport and rising renewable adoption. Across the Asean-6 automotive market (Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, Vietnam and Singapore), electric and hybrid vehicles accounted for roughly 13% of passenger sales in 2024 (about 351,000 units).
Singapore is well ahead of the pack, with nearly two-thirds of new cars now electric or hybrid. Vietnam and Thailand hover at around 25%, with Malaysia gathering pace. Between January and October 2025, Malaysia registered 31,273 electric vehicles (EVs), already more than the entirety of 2024.
Danial Rahman is the Asian Strategy and Leadership Institute (ASLI) chief executive officer.
Batteries, however, do not last forever. Many car manufacturers offer warranties for an average of eight years or 160,000km, before range loss forces retirement. The surge in adoption this decade almost guarantees a surge in waste the next.
Malaysia alone may face 870,000 end-of-life EV batteries by 2050. Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia will confront similar volumes as two-wheeler (motorbike) electrification accelerates. The pile is growing quickly.
Ernest Scheyder captures the scale powerfully in his book The War Below, “Each year, about 50 million tonnes of electronic waste is generated, an amount roughly equivalent to every commercial aircraft ever built.”
Lithium-ion batteries are among the most hazardous waste streams the region will produce, and without systems to manage them they burn, leach metals into water, and quietly unravel climate gains.
However, with the right processing, these potential hazards can be avoided. Unlike fuel, a battery does not disappear through use, it accumulates. If Sout-East Asia can recover the lithium, nickel, cobalt and manganese held inside spent packs, it can turn discarded capacity into a resource.
That is the logic of Green Industrial Recycling: where sustainability enables growth. Through this, we can extend the use of batteries beyond their original lifespan. Other regions have already begun to understand this shift. China is the dominant player with about 70% of global lithium battery recycling capacity, largely due to its massive EV market and comprehensive government policies.
The European Union has legislated minimum recovery thresholds, starting with 50% lithium recovery in 2027 and rising to 80% by 2031, supported by digital passports for traceability, while the United States is investing in research and development for battery recycling.
Asean sits in the early chapters of the same story. It can still shape the outcome, although time is of the essence.
Mikaila Butt is ASLI’s Advisory and Research Advocacy manager
There are already cautionary precedents. Informal battery breaking and smelting in the Javanese village of Pesarean, Indonesia, has contaminated soil near a school with more than 150,000 ppm of lead, and turned a creek grey with run-off that eventually affect rice paddies.
In Ghana’s Agbogbloshie, open burning of discarded electronics has polluted groundwater with cadmium and arsenic. Guiyu in China was once the world’s most notorious electronics graveyard, and studies recorded heavy-metal concentrations in downstream rivers hundreds of times above natural levels.
None of these began with electric-vehicle batteries. All show how quickly “recycling” becomes poisonous when left to the informal sector. Without intervention, Asean could repeat the pattern, only this time with lithium.
The region’s coming waste stream is not confined to car batteries. Consumer electronics now cycle through households in tens of millions each year. Rooftop solar is expanding, and storage cells will age out. Even power tools and household appliances ride the same middle-class consumption curve. These flows are feedstock waiting to be captured.
Green Industrial Recycling offers South-East Asia the chance to reduce its dependency on imported minerals and to produce refined materials at home. Cobalt and copper from phones, lithium from e-scooter packs, and nickel from EV modules can all be recovered. Each cycle of reuse tightens the loop and strengthens industrial resilience.
The prize is greater than pollution control. Oil shaped the last century, and lithium can shape the next. The difference is that lithium can be recycled indefinitely, with the constraint being not geology but policy.
Asean now stands between two futures. In the first, batteries are imported, used and discarded. Value leaks outwards, waste flows inwards. In the second, batteries are recovered, refined and returned to circulation. The region becomes a participant in the mineral economy, not just a consumer of it.
The climate transition cannot stop at electrification, as an EV is only as green as the fate of its battery. Therefore, progress will be measured not just by how many EVs South-East Asia puts on its roads, but what it does with the battery once the driving is over.
This is where the region’s ESG ambitions will be tested. Green Industrial Recycling should not be an afterthought to decarbonisation, rather it should act as the hinge that determines whether the transition is clean in practice or only on paper.
The moment to build that capacity is now, while the batteries still have charge, as history will remember not just how fast Asean electrified, but how wisely it dealt with what followed.
