As per Electrive, the Japanese carmaker and the battery recycling expert already signed an agreement which will gather know-how from both parties, with the main goal being to "investigate ways of commercializing the process of locating, safely transporting, dismantling, repairing and repurposing EV batteries for second life usage."

The first step is making sure that researchers have enough battery cells to study and for this, the two companies will be recovering used batteries from Nissan Leaf models in the UK, which will be sent to Ecobat's UK Diagnostic and Disassembly Centre, located near Birmingham. There, Nissan experts will determine the batteries' safety and long-term performance potential.

The aim of the project is to create a circular approach in the energy economy and batteries that can still perform optimally and safely will be used in applications such as energy storage systems to balance the grid or for backup power. Batteries that can't be used for secondary applications will be recycled.

Alan Low, EV Battery Circular Economy Manager at Nissan Energy Services, said that "these are batteries from cars that have been dismantled due to old age or that have been written off by insurers, however the batteries themselves still have an opportunity to be reused. They still have a useful life ahead of them, so we need to create a sustainable way of recovering them."

Ecobat also signed an agreement with German carmaker Volkswagen to address the situation for old batteries, but that partnership only covers recycling cells, instead of exploring alternative use cases.