Gigafactories are recycling old EV batteries into new ones

Though dark satanic mills are long gone from industry, the start of the lithium-ion-battery production line in a factory in Vasteras, west of Stockholm, is particularly squeaky clean. Air-lock doors, a filtered atmosphere and workers dressed head-to-toe in sterile white suits make it look more like a pharma lab than a plant for assembling the single most-expensive component in an electric vehicle (EV).

So important are batteries to the future of carmaking that every country with an auto industry is rushing to attract plants to make them—“gigafactories”, as they are known in the business. The term was originally coined by Tesla, an American producer of EVs, for a battery factory in Nevada, which it began building in 2014 in collaboration with Panasonic, a Japanese firm. The name relates to an annual production measured in gigawatt-hours (GWh) of storage capacity.