100,000 EVs and No Recycling Plant — Where Will Your Dead Battery Go?

Sri Lanka passed 100,000 registered EVs by mid-2026, most of them electric bikes and three-wheelers, but an Auditor General's report out this month found there's still no system to track, collect, or recycle a battery once it dies. Only a handful of licensed e-waste collectors are set up to handle these packs, which are officially classed as hazardous waste, there's no local recycling plant, and customs doesn't even have a separate code to track how many battery packs are actually coming into the country. One side says this is normal growing pains — give the market a few more years and recyclers will show up once there's enough dead batteries to make it profitable, the same way it eventually happened with lead-acid batteries. The other side says we're about to repeat the CFL-bulb and lead-battery mess, except lithium packs are bigger and nastier if they're dumped or burned, and by the time anyone builds a plant there could be thousands of dead packs sitting in garages with nowhere safe to go. If you're running an EV or e-three-wheeler that's a few years old, what actually happened when the battery started fading — did the dealer take it back, or are you storing a dying battery yourself right now? ඔයාගේ EV එකේ බැටරිය පාడු උනාම ඒක දාන්න තියෙන හරි විදිහ ගැන ඔයා දන්නවද?