Safety is the first concern of actors involved in the management of end-of-life batteries, from collection, refurbishing for second life, transport, storing, sorting to final recycling.

As soon as one of the above operations modify the integrity of a battery (or one of its components like the cells), new risks can pop up and create an impact on human health or the environment. The safety legislation provides a minimum framework to handle those risks, although per definition zero risk does not exist.

Examples of physical risks are explosion, fires, fast combustion, etc. They can cause severe damage to humans and the installations.

Depending of their chemistry, some batteries contain flammable electrolytes, or very reactive chemicals that can cause a chain reaction of combustion.

Exposure to harmful chemicals is the critical parameter here. Batteries contain chemicals that are regulated under the Occupational Exposure legal framework. For example, exposure of workers to some compounds of Ni, Co, etc. when recycling batteries or when producing new battery grade materials from batteries.

The last category is made of environmental risks, like emissions to the environment (air, water, soil, sediments), creating a pollution. Such environmental impacts can be contained when part of a well-establish recycling process, but the situation can be completely different in case of incident, road accident, or any unforeseen circumstances.

The risks during transport is subject to some legislations at UN level. Some of them have been translated in the EU legal framework (like ADR for road transport, specific to Europe and some other countries, but replaced by other types of legislation in some part of the world), others remain international per definition (IMDG/IATA).

Some batteries are subject to transport regulations like:

• ADR (road transport)

• IMDG (sea transport)

• IATA (air transport)

• Other pieces of specific legislation (RID for rail transport, ?? For inlands waterways, ADNR for navigation on the Rhine river…)

The risks during transport are different when newly manufactured batteries are considered or when transporting damaged, defective, or end-of-life batteries. For this reasons, the prescriptions to follow to ensure a safe transportation are different in function of the position of a battery in the whole battery chain. The matter is rather complex. Some professional battery associations have joined forces to sponsor two e-books about the safe transportation of batteries;

• For Li-Ion batteries

• For all other type of batteries.

The e-books are freely available on the following website: https://www.batteriestransport.org/section/299/digital-library.

Because the UN framework is revised / updated every 2 years, the e-books will be also be updated from time to time. For this reason, the e-books are only available for online reading. A decision tree is available allowing you to find your way in this rather complicated matter.