Flagship paper: Recycling lithium-ion batteries from electric vehicles
Image: Opening of Altilium EV battery recycling plant.
In 2019, researchers from the Universities of Birmingham, Newcastle and Leicester together with collaborators from Argonne National Laboratory in the US published a paper in Nature Recycling lithium-ion batteries from electric vehicles as an output from the Faraday Institution’s ReLiB project.
It outlines and evaluates the range of approaches to EV lithium-ion battery recycling and re-use, and highlight areas for future progress.
As of July 2026 it is perhaps the flagship paper from the Faraday Institution community and the top paper as ranked by number of citations.
It has:
- Been cited 3,456 times
- Viewed 1,294 times
- Has a Field-Weighted Citation Impact* (FWCI) of 25.09 (approximately 16 times the UK average)
- Been referenced in 14 patent families
- Has 106 citations in policy documents
In 2025, a Korean group conducted a bibliometric analysis of the field of literature in battery recycling and concluded the ReLiB paper was the most cited. On analysing the global citation networks for battery recycling papers, they show how centrally located the Faraday ReLiB project and University of Birmingham are, with the third most collaborative papers globally (and the top outside China).
*Field-Weighted Citation Impact measures how well a publication performs in terms of citations compared to similar publications in the same field, year, and document type. It is designed to normalise citation performance so that disciplines with different citation behaviours can be compared fairly. The UK FWCI over the same period is 1.54.
Success story published August 2026.