Electric Vehicle batteries

WQ.107/2025

WRITTEN QUESTION TO THE MINISTER FOR INFRASTRUCTURE BY DEPUTY S.M. AHIER OF ST. HELIER NORTH

QUESTION SUBMITTED ON MONDAY 10th MARCH 2025 ANSWER TO BE TABLED ON MONDAY 17th MARCH 2025

Question

"Will the Minister advise –

1. the number of electric vehicle rechargeable batteries stored at the La Collette recycling facility and how these are being kept;
2. whether a recycling solution for the batteries has been identified and the cost of safe disposal of each battery; and
3. whether customers will be required to pay a fee to cover the disposal cost?"

Answer

1. There are currently no Electric Vehicle batteries stored at any of the La Collette facilities including the Waste Metals Facility.
2. As part of the agreement with Hunt Bros for services provided from the Waste Metals Facility, there is a mechanism to accept Electric Vehicles and provide a solution for the recycling of the batteries. This is subject to compliance with licensing conditions set by the Regulation Department on behalf of the Environment Minister. The breakdown of costs for this service is commercially confidential but consists of the removal of the traction battery, shipping and processing at an authorised facility in the UK.
3. To date we have seen very few end-of-life electric vehicles being disposed of in the

Island. Given the numbers and ages of electric vehicles registered with DVS we don't envisage more than a dozen likely to be disposed of per year for the next few years.

Other jurisdictions have taken a producer responsibility' stance with the end-of-life disposal costs of electric vehicles and batteries. For example, the UK has the End-of-Life Vehicles (Producer Responsibility) Regulations 2005 and Waste Batteries and Accumulators Regulations 2009. This means that the vehicle and battery producers are required to take back the vehicle or batteries at the end of their life at no cost to the end user.

The assumption is that these end-of-life disposal costs are therefore embedded in the purchase price of vehicles and the producer is incentivised to ensure that the vehicles and batteries are designed to be cost-effectively split into their component parts and those parts re-used or recycled.

This principle of producer responsibility is one we aim to see mirrored in Jersey. Under that principle I do not envisage either the taxpayer or the end user needing to cover the full costs of disposal of EVs or their batteries at the point that they are disposed of in the long-term.

However, further work is needed to get us to that point. The Environment Minister and I wrote to the Chair of the Jersey Motor Trades Federation on 28th February, and to our electric vehicle incentive participating retailers on 3rd March, in order to understand how these regulations are applied by producers of the vehicles imported into Jersey. In addition, officers are engaging with the UK government to understand the options available to us.

In the meantime, I am working with the Minister for the Environment to establish a limited pilot scheme to be in place for when we do start to see EVs coming for disposal. This pilot will enable us to gather data to understand more about the disposal processes and costs for end-of-life electric vehicles or their batteries. During this pilot the costs of disposal will not need to be met by customers. The current intention is that this pilot will be allocated funding from the Climate Emergency Fund from the budget allocated to supporting the uptake of electric vehicles.