The battery passport has four fields for recycled content. The method for filling them is late, and it comes with a 1.3 multiplier for European recycling

Annex XIII of the battery regulation puts the recycled shares of cobalt, lithium, nickel and lead in the public part of the battery passport. Article 8 says how those shares are to be documented and gave the Commission until 18 August 2026 to adopt the method. The draft delegated regulation appeared on 12 August, collected feedback until 9 September and has not been adopted. That makes two acts due on the same day in the same regulation, both late. This one is different from the access rules, because the regulation ties your own obligation to it: the declaration starts on 18 August 2028 or 24 months after the act enters into force, whichever is later. The draft also introduces something the regulation never mentioned, a 1.3 correction factor for material recycled inside the Union.

What Article 8 requires, and of whom

Article 8 has three layers with three dates, and it is worth keeping them apart from the passport date.

• Documentation (paragraph 1). Industrial batteries above 2 kWh, except those with only external storage, EV batteries and SLI batteries whose active materials contain cobalt, lead, lithium or nickel must be accompanied by documentation stating the recycled share of each, per battery model, per year, per manufacturing plant. From 18 August 2028 or 24 months after the delegated act enters into force, whichever is later. LMT batteries join on 18 August 2033.
• First targets (paragraph 2). From 18 August 2031 the technical documentation must show minimum shares: 16 percent cobalt, 85 percent lead, 6 percent lithium, 6 percent nickel. Industrial, EV and SLI batteries.
• Second targets (paragraph 3). From 18 August 2036: 26 percent cobalt, 85 percent lead, 12 percent lithium, 15 percent nickel. LMT batteries are added here.

Paragraph 5 adds a review: by 31 December 2028 the Commission assesses whether the targets should change, based on the availability of recovered material. Repurposed, re-used and remanufactured batteries are outside all of this.

The passport link is Annex XIII point 1(e): the information on recycled content from the Article 8 documentation is public passport data. The Commission guidance on data points, which we covered last week, numbers them 20 to 23 and marks all four as not to be filled on 18 February 2027, in every battery category. That is correct, and now you can see why: the documentation they come from does not exist until the method does.

The deadline, and what missing it does to yours

Article 8(1), third subparagraph: by 18 August 2026 the Commission adopts a delegated act establishing the calculation and verification methodology and the documentation format. The register entry is 14858. The draft was published for feedback on 12 August 2026, six days before the deadline, with a four-week window that closed on 9 September. Seventy responses. The entry then moved to the next stage; adoption has not happened. Under Article 89 an adopted delegated act still waits for the Parliament and the Council before it can be published.

Now the arithmetic. If the act is adopted late in 2026 and enters into force in early 2027, 24 months lands in early 2029, later than 18 August 2028, so early 2029 is your date. Every month of delay in Brussels is a month of delay in your obligation. This is the opposite of the access rules act under Article 77(9), which missed the same day and moved nothing for you, because the passport starts on 18 February 2027 regardless.

The regulation is now two for two on statutory deadlines for the Commission's own acts. We do not read that as a forecast for the others. We read it as a reason to plan from the act, not from the date in the annex.

What the draft actually says

The draft is short, five pages plus a fifteen-page annex, and its scope is exactly the Article 8 list: industrial batteries above 2 kWh without exclusively external storage, EV, SLI and LMT batteries. The annex has four sections. The first three set the method; the fourth sets the format of the documentation.

The method is mass balance per plant and per period. Recycled content is computed on input fractions and output fractions over a rolling accounting period, per battery model, per year, per manufacturing plant. Operators upstream of the battery manufacturer, the ones producing precursors and active materials, keep their own tables at plant level and make them available to notified bodies. The battery manufacturer draws up the study that supports the declared share and carries the obligation.

The format is five tables. Table 1 identifies the plant. Table 2 the model, material and accounting period. Table 3 the output fractions with masses of recycled and total material, split between material recycled in the Union and in third countries. Table 4 continues that. Table 5 is the calculation of the documented share. Masses in tonnes, shares in mass percent. Whoever plans to put a number into passport field 20 should plan to have these five tables behind it, because a notified body will ask for them.

The multiplier is new. Section 2.2.5 of the annex: until 31 December 2036, an operator further processing material recovered from waste recycled in an installation operating in the Union may apply a correction factor of 1.3 to that input fraction. Lithium, nickel and cobalt only, not lead. Only if every recycling step took place in the Union; producing black mass in the Union and processing it elsewhere does not qualify. Applied once, at the step right after recycling, never again downstream. The draft justifies it over five recitals on supply security: import reliance of 81 percent for cobalt, 75 percent for nickel and 100 percent for lithium, recycling capacity concentrated outside the Union, export restrictions in producer countries.

In plain terms: a tonne of recycled cobalt from a European plant will count as 1.3 tonnes toward the 16 percent target. A tonne from anywhere else counts as one. The regulation of 2023 contains no such rule. The delegated act creates it, and the empowerment in Article 8 is to set a methodology for calculation and verification. Whether a 30 percent bonus is methodology or policy is a question several of the seventy responses will have raised, and it is the kind of thing that gets tested at the Parliament and Council stage.

A small sign of haste

Recital 1 of the draft summarises the dates and says the mandatory targets for LMT batteries apply from 18 August 2026. The regulation says 2036. It is a typo in an explanatory recital, not in an operative provision, and it will be caught. It is also what a document looks like when it goes out six days before a deadline it will miss anyway.

What this changes for a battery passport in February

Nothing in the data you must show on 18 February 2027. Fields 20 to 23 stay empty and that is the compliant state. What changes is what you should be collecting.

• The unit of the declaration is the model, the year and the plant. A passport at model level can carry it. A passport that only knows the product and not the plant cannot.
• The data comes from upstream. The share depends on what your cell or active material supplier records in their tables. If your supply contract does not name recycled content data as a deliverable, start there.
• Where the recycling happened will be a data field, because the multiplier depends on it. Union or third country, per input fraction, is a column in Table 3 of the draft.
• Documented share and target are different numbers. The passport shows the documented share from 2028 or 2029. The targets bite in 2031 and 2036. A low number in the passport in 2029 is legal.

What this is not

This is not adopted. The draft can change, the multiplier can be cut or removed, and the Parliament and Council have their say after adoption. Everything above is the state of a draft on 15 September 2026.

This is not a portable battery rule. Article 8 does not cover portable batteries at all, and the LMT declaration only starts in 2033.

This is not a passport delay. The passport starts on 18 February 2027 with four empty fields. The fields fill later.

How to check this yourself

The regulation is free at https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2023/1542/oj/eng; the provisions cited are Article 8(1) to (5), Article 89 and Annex XIII point 1(e). The register entry with the draft, its annex, the feedback window and the count is at https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/brpapi/groupInitiatives/14858?language=EN. The correction factor is section 2.2.5 of the draft annex; the documentation format is section 4. The Commission guidance that marks fields 20 to 23 as empty is linked from the news item of 21 August 2026 on the DG GROW site.

What to do this week

• If you make or import EV, SLI or industrial batteries above 2 kWh, write down which of the four metals are in your active material. If none, Article 8 does not apply to you at all.
• Ask your cell supplier one question: can you deliver recycled content per material, per plant, per year, in a format resembling the draft's Table 3? The answer is a data point about your supplier.
• Put a placeholder date of early 2029 in your plan for the first declaration, and a note to recompute it from the act's entry into force.
• If you buy recycled material, start recording where it was recycled. A field you did not keep in 2027 cannot be multiplied in 2029.

FAQ

Łukasz Głuch

Builds DPPera, a digital product passport tool for small and medium-sized companies. Reads the delegated acts so you do not have to. Writes about what he checked in the registry, not about what vendors promise.

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