EY Director Mark Main says the UK end-of-life vehicle sector must move from fragmented pilots to coordinated, investable infrastructure. To capture EV circularity value, ATFs, OEMs, recyclers and investors need shared commercial objectives, reliable data, material-specific standards and bankable volume certainty across the supply chain.
Electrification is rewriting the economics of vehicle ownership, and the recycling sector needs to move from isolated pilots to coordinated, investable infrastructure if the UK is to capture the value rather than lose it overseas, EY’s Mark Main told delegates at Auto Recycling Intelligence 2026.
Main, a Director at EY and the firm’s UK&I Transport & Logistics Leader within its Mobility practice, opened by reframing the debate away from purchase price and toward total cost of ownership (TCO). Operating costs, he noted, typically account for 60-75% of a vehicle’s lifetime TCO, with end-of-life processing sitting as both a cost and, increasingly, an opportunity that manufacturers and finance companies are only beginning to model properly.
That shift is being driven, he argued, by a value chain being reshaped simultaneously by data, regulation and risk. Residual value volatility, stranded assets from interim technologies such as PHEVs, and the pace of battery innovation are all complicating forecasting. Meanwhile, regulation “has not kept pace.”
Mapping the end-of-life EV ecosystem across collection, dismantling, sorting and remarketing, Main identified five system challenges: access and leakage in ELV and parts collection; the efficiency and scale of dismantling; faster, more automated triage for value recovery; building supply of automotive-grade recycled material; and traceability of secondary material through the chain. Today’s model, he said, is built on isolated bilateral relationships, uncertain pilot volumes, fragmented quality control and opaque pricing, none of which will support the scale the sector needs.
Three enablers, he told the room, matter most: shared commercial objectives across OEMs, dismantlers and recyclers so that value recovery is rewarded rather than just throughput or compliance; harmonised data and standards, including vehicle and battery passports, so parts and materials carry verifiable history through the chain; and the right industry structures for each material stream, since metals, plastics and batteries scale in very different ways. He cited several examples of OEMs already building this infrastructure.
Data access remains a live frustration, while the forklift and IT industries, where cross-company grading and data-sharing protocols are already routine, provide a better blueprint.
His call to action centred on collaboration to de-risk investment, aggregation to make economics scale, and the creation of “bankable” volume certainty that investors say is currently missing. Without it, he warned, capital will keep sitting on the sidelines waiting for offtake agreements that don’t yet exist.
Fielding questions, Main was pressed on where the commercial incentive is strongest today. His answer prioritised extending vehicle and battery life through repair over dismantling, followed by making battery recycling economically viable in its own right. Asked about China’s role, he said Chinese manufacturers remain focused on new sales for now, though growing interest from battery producers suggests that could shift.
Further Reading on ATF Professional
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Why All Industry Stakeholders Should Be in the Room at Auto Recycling Intelligence 2026
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Maximising EV Battery Value: Why Repurposing Deserves a Place in the EV Battery Value Chain
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Connected Energy to Develop UK’s Most Advanced Second-Life EV Battery Testing Facility
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Global Car Recycling Day 20th June 2026
