Trace battery materials from extraction through use and recovery, identify supply, human-rights, environmental, safety, and regulatory risks, and find practical ways to build a more circular battery system.
Purpose of the template
Batteries are essential to electrification and energy storage, but their supply chains can depend on critical materials, energy-intensive processing, complex global manufacturing, and safe systems for reuse and recycling. This template helps teams map one battery type or application across its full life cycle.
It supports responsible sourcing, lower-impact battery chemistry, longer life, repairability, safe second-life use, collection, material recovery, and advocacy for stronger sustainability regulation and industry standards.
What is included
The template follows six connected stages:
Battery materials & sourcing
Refining & active-material production
Cell, pack & product manufacturing
Use, maintenance & second life
Collection, take-back & reuse
Recycling & closed-loop recovery
Each stage includes guiding questions and prefilled examples of key risks and opportunities, including critical-material sourcing, human rights, water and biodiversity impacts, refining capacity, battery passports, repairability, safety assessments, second-life applications, producer responsibility, safe transport, recycling, and closed-loop materials.
The final stage feeds back into the first: recovered battery materials can become circular inputs for new batteries.
How to use it
Start by completing the Business profile and Battery profile. Choose one battery type or application—such as an electric-vehicle battery, stationary-storage battery, laptop battery, or smartphone battery—before mapping another.
Work from Stage 1 to Stage 6. Add sticky notes with findings, evidence, suppliers, sourcing locations, unanswered questions, assumptions, risks, and opportunities. Use green markers for opportunities or actions to explore, and orange markers for risks, gaps, dependencies, or requirements.
Finish by reviewing the full chain together. Prioritise the most important supply, human-rights, environmental, safety, and regulatory risks. Agree the strongest opportunities to reduce virgin-material use, extend battery life, enable safe return routes, and build viable closed loops.
Suggested workshop
Run this as a 90–120 minute cross-functional workshop.
Before the session, select one battery type or application and gather available information on battery chemistry, materials, suppliers, manufacturing, product design, warranties, repair, collection, recycling partners, regulations, and battery-passport requirements.
Begin by agreeing the scope and completing the two profiles. Then spend around 10–15 minutes on each supply-chain stage, using the prompts to capture evidence, uncertainties, risks, and circularity opportunities. Mark the most important notes as green or orange as you go.
Use the final 15–20 minutes to agree priorities: the most significant supply, environmental, social, safety, and regulatory risks; the most promising interventions; and the actions the business will take, support, lead, or advocate for.
Who it is for
Use this template with sustainability, battery engineering, product design, procurement, supply-chain, operations, repair and service, recycling, compliance, legal, safety, finance, and leadership teams. It is also useful in supplier discussions, battery-strategy workshops, due-diligence reviews, circular-design projects, and end-of-life planning.
A starting point, not a complete list
The template is deliberately prefilled with suggestions, example risks, and possible opportunities to make it easier to begin. These are prompts—not fixed answers or a complete checklist. Change, remove, add to, or adapt every element to reflect your battery chemistry, product, markets, suppliers, regulations, and business priorities.
What you will leave with
A shared map of the battery supply chain, its highest-priority risks and dependencies, opportunities to reduce impact and increase circularity, key regulations and standards, evidence gaps, and a practical set of actions for a more responsible, resilient battery system.
