Second Life of Electric Vehicle Batteries and Recycling Infrastructure in Uzbekistan: Challenges and Opportunities

Uzbekistan has become one of the fastest-electrifying road-transport markets in Central Asia. Within roughly half a decade the national fleet has grown from a few hundred electric vehicles to more than seventy thousand, and the country has moved from being a pure importer to assembling new-energy vehicles domestically. This rapid ramp-up, however, carries an inevitable downstream consequence that has so far received little attention: every battery placed on the road today will eventually reach the end of its automotive service life, and the volume of spent lithium-ion packs will rise sharply within the next decade. This paper examines the twin pathways through which that future stream can be managed productively rather than discarded — repurposing for a “second life” in stationary energy storage, and material recovery through recycling — and assesses how prepared Uzbekistan is to capture their value. Drawing on current market data, recent legislation, and the international technical literature, the study characterises the coming retirement wave, evaluates the emerging regulatory framework (including the 2025 introduction of a battery-disposal financing mechanism and a substantially higher recycling fee), and identifies the principal technical, economic, infrastructural and institutional barriers. A simple cohort-based projection suggests that retired battery capacity will remain modest until the early 2030s and then accelerate, giving policymakers a narrow but valuable window in which to build the necessary collection, testing and processing capacity. The analysis argues that second-life storage is well matched to several pressing national needs — grid support, solar integration and rural electrification — while domestic recycling could reinforce the country’s ambitious critical-raw-materials programme by returning lithium, nickel, cobalt and copper to the value chain. A staged roadmap is proposed to convert what is currently a looming waste liability into an industrial and energy-security asset.