18 Months to a Lithium-Ion Battery Universal Waste Rule: What H.R. 9615 Does on Day One

H.R. 9615 cleared the House by voice vote on September 15, 2026, and every summary I read that week led with the same line: EPA gets eighteen months to recognize lithium-ion batteries as universal waste. That's section 2(c) of the bill. It's also the part that changes the least, because the lithium-ion battery universal waste question was never the thing blocking recyclers.

Section 2(b), which takes effect the day a signature lands, says nothing about classification. It swaps out a storage permit. For anyone running or financing a black mass line, that swap is the bill, and the lithium-ion battery universal waste rulemaking is a 2028 problem.

I run grates and boilers, not a battery plant. But cells have been showing up in my pit and on my tip floor for a decade, and the recyclers who were supposed to take them off me have been stuck behind one permit the whole time. So I read the bill.

Universal waste has always stopped at the recycler's gate

Part 273 is a collection rule. It exists so a hardware store, a school district or a transfer station can gather hazardous waste batteries without carrying a full generator's paperwork, then ship them somewhere competent. EPA laid out how that applies to lithium chemistries in its May 2023 memorandum on lithium battery regulatory status: most lithium-ion batteries are likely hazardous waste at end of life, on the ignitability (D001) and reactivity (D003) characteristics, and they can move under the streamlined universal waste standards until they reach a destination facility.

Read that last clause twice. Once a battery arrives at the destination facility for recycling, EPA's position is that it stops being universal waste and becomes fully regulated hazardous waste. The memo is blunter still on shredding: a universal waste handler may not shred batteries, so anyone producing black mass can't be a handler and has to be a destination facility. Universal waste status, in other words, is a benefit that belongs to everybody upstream of the recycler.

That's not a drafting oversight, it's the design. Part 273 trades reduced handler burden for a guarantee that the material lands somewhere fully permitted. So it's reasonable policy. And it's also the reason an eighteen-month rulemaking about classification does very little for the company that has to take the material.

The permit nobody can size

The expensive sentence in this whole regime is 40 CFR 273.60(a). A destination facility has to meet the applicable requirements of six other parts of the hazardous waste rules, the permit program and the permit decision procedures among them, plus notification. Translated to a schedule: a Part B application, public notice, and a review measured in years rather than quarters.

Now the twist that turns a cost into a blockage. The recycling itself is exempt. EPA's memo confirms that removing batteries from devices, sorting, discharging, disassembly and even shredding to black mass all sit inside the exempt recycling process at 261.6(c)(1). Storage before recycling is not exempt. A recycler that holds characteristic hazardous batteries, or black mass that carries a characteristic, before feeding the process needs a Part B permit for that storage.

And then the line that has cost this industry more capital than anything else in RCRA: federal rules set no allowable holding time before material enters the recycling process. EPA's memo says the Region or the authorized state agency may define one site by site, deciding at what point storage begins.

Sit with that if you've ever sized an inbound buffer. Your shredder (Vecoplan, Komptech, whatever you specified) runs at a fixed rate. Inbound arrives on trucks, in volumes you don't control, at a state of charge no manifest will tell you. You need a buffer; every pre-processing line I've walked needs a buffer. So how many days of inbound is a buffer, and how many days is storage? The boundary is a judgment call by a regulator you haven't met yet, and your capital structure sits on the wrong side of it until you have.

Twenty years in plants taught me that most of what gets called an efficiency problem is instrumentation drift rather than process: the gauge is lying, not the burner. Permitting reads the same way. The agency isn't slow, it's being asked to draw a boundary nobody ever wrote down.

What section 2(b) swaps, and the clock it hands you

Section 2(b) is interim. It runs from enactment until EPA issues the rule under 2(c), and it's drafted as a substitution: in lieu of 273.60(a), a destination facility that stores lithium-ion batteries before recycling them complies instead with four handler requirements, as though it were a large quantity handler of universal waste.

Those four are the standards for damaged and leaking batteries, employee training, response to releases, and accumulation time limits. The bill then routes the facility to 273.60(b) as though it didn't store the batteries at all, which lands on a much shorter list: get an EPA identification number, use the manifest, report discrepancies.

So the trade is handler-grade fire and training rules plus manifest discipline, in place of a treatment, storage and disposal facility permit. For a recycler sitting on a Part B application, that's the difference between a line that runs next year and a line that runs in 2029.

It isn't free. Accumulation time limits means 40 CFR 273.35, which gives a large quantity handler one year from the date the waste is generated or received. Longer is allowed only where the accumulation is solely to collect enough material for proper recovery, and the burden of proving that sits on the handler. You also have to show how long anything has been sitting, by container date or on-site inventory.

Price that as a constraint on offtake, because that's what it is. If your hydrometallurgical partner is two years from commissioning and you're warehousing feedstock against their startup, section 2(b) hands you a twelve-month clock and the burden of explaining yourself to a permit writer. Several business models in this sector are built on exactly that warehouse. (Anyone whose plan depends on holding cells for a better black mass price should put a number on that clock before the Senate does anything.)

Section 3 is where the states come in

The bill's third section is titled "Technical Updates." It rewrites one sentence of the Mercury-Containing and Rechargeable Battery Management Act, and I'd argue it's the most consequential thing in the package.

42 U.S.C. 14323(a) says that notwithstanding any state or local law governing the collection, storage or transportation of used rechargeable batteries, those activities are regulated under the EPA regulations published at 60 Fed. Reg. 25492 on May 11, 1995, as effective on that date. A frozen snapshot. The federal battery rule that overrides state law has been the 1995 text for thirty years, whatever Part 273 said afterward.

So section 3 strikes that citation and inserts "part 273 of title 40, Code of Federal Regulations (or any successor regulations)."

State adoption of the universal waste program is optional, and EPA's guidance on state universal waste programs explains why: Part 273 is less stringent than the baseline it replaced, so states take it up voluntarily and may write different standards provided they stay equivalent. Batteries are the carve-out, because of the Battery Act. Without section 3, a new federal lithium-ion battery universal waste rule would reach only the jurisdictions EPA administers directly and arrive everywhere else whenever each agency got round to it. We have watched that film already; the 2026 state battery EPR statutes are a patchwork for exactly this reason.

With a live cross-reference, the override tracks whatever EPA writes next. Build a lithium-specific category under 2(c), and section 3 carries it into state collection, storage and transportation rules without fifty separate adoptions. That mechanism didn't make anybody's press release, and it's the one I'd want a lawyer's read on before I believed it all the way down.

What to check while the bill sits in the Senate

Three bills moved that day. H.R. 9617 directs EPA to consult other agencies on a National Critical Mineral Recovery Strategy aimed at recovering minerals from discarded material, and H.R. 9616 authorizes $10 million a year to pull critical materials out of contaminated sites, widened to National Priorities List properties, as reported by Waste Dive. None of the three has moved in the Senate. A sober planning assumption is that nothing here is law before the next Congress seats.

The critical minerals framing is why any of it moved at all. USGS put the United States at complete import reliance for sixteen minerals in its 2026 commodity summaries, natural graphite among them, and named China a top producer of at least half. A shredded battery is domestic graphite, cobalt and nickel already inside the border. That argument gets bills out of committee in a way that "hazardous waste streamlining" never has.

Worth knowing too that EPA was already headed here. The lithium-ion battery universal waste proposal, bundled with solar panels, has sat on the Unified Agenda as RIN 2050-AH32 since the 2023 announcement, with a proposed rule targeted for February 2026 and final action in 2027. I can't find a notice of proposed rulemaking in the Federal Register as of this writing, which means the agency has evidently missed its own February target. That slip is the best argument for section 2(b) existing: interim relief that works without a rulemaking beats a deadline EPA has already overrun once.

If you handle batteries at either end of this chain, five things are worth doing now rather than after a Senate vote:

1. Find your storage definition in writing. Whatever your Region or your state has told you about when accumulation becomes storage, get the letter out of the file. Section 2(b) doesn't move that boundary, it changes what sits on the far side of it.
2. Start date-stamping. 273.35 wants container dates or an on-site inventory, and retrofitting that onto a yard full of undated boxes is a far worse job than building it in from day one.
3. Check your state's adoption, not EPA's. In an authorized state your operative requirement is the state analog, and section 2(b) is drafted in terms of the federal text.
4. Reprice any offtake that assumes a multi-year stockpile against a twelve-month limit with the burden of proof on you.
5. Keep your black mass question separate from your battery question. EPA's memo is explicit that black mass is neither universal waste nor a battery any longer, and nothing in this bill changes how your filter cake gets characterized.

Where I'd be careful: none of this touches a facility whose real problem is upstream. If batteries are reaching you buried in mixed loads, permitting is the wrong lever and you're looking at detection and suppression instead, where the economics of early fire detection on a sorting line don't depend on anything Congress does. EPA's 2021 analysis counted more than 240 lithium-ion battery fires at 64 waste handling and recycling sites between 2013 and 2020, and the agency said its own count underestimates the real total because these events go substantially unreported. But nothing in H.R. 9615 moves that number. Batteries in a tip pile are a landfill diversion and sorting problem long before they're a permitting one.

Second limit: scale. A machine shop or a school district sending a few hundred pounds a month was already comfortable under Part 273 and gains nothing here. This bill aims at the destination facility end of the chain, which in the United States is a few dozen companies. If you're a generator, your benefit is indirect and shows up only once those companies build capacity, which is the same reason zero-waste-to-landfill programs stall on battery streams: the contract says divert, and the receiving end isn't permitted to take the volume.

Third, and this is the one I'd watch: section 2(b) imports the handler fire rules, and those rules are thin. The large quantity handler standard asks you to contain batteries showing evidence of leakage, spillage or damage. That's a fair rule for a collection bin at the back of a hardware store. It is not a design basis for a building holding tonnes of charged cells, and I'd expect state fire marshals and insurers to close that gap well ahead of EPA. The bill half admits it, telling the Administrator to consider "additional safety requirements needed to address gaps in existing protections."

One more thing from my side of the fence. I care about a recycler's storage permit because my alternative is worse: cells nobody can economically take end up in the stream I burn. A battery that reaches a Martin grate has already passed a bunker, a crane grab and a feed chute, and each of those is a place for a thermal event with a fuel pile sitting on top of it. On the Baltimore RDF line in 2018 we lost roughly nine percent availability to feed chute bridging before we re-angled the hopper and added a bin vibrator [from that project's availability records]. A dull mechanical problem, and still exactly the kind of geometry that turns one smouldering cell into a shift-ending incident.

Which is why collection and conversion belong on the same drawing. A plant's thermal conversion technology only ever sees what the sorting chain hands it, and that chain only moves what somebody downstream holds a permit to receive. Treat them as two problems and you pay for both.

What I can't settle from the text is whether section 2(b) does anything at all in a RCRA-authorized state before the rulemaking lands. The provision speaks in terms of the federal regulations, and across most of the country the operative requirements are a state's adopted analog of them. A federal statute saying "in lieu of 273.60(a)" has an obvious meaning where EPA runs the program directly and a much murkier one in a state with its own authorized program and its own permit writers. Section 3's amendment reaches state law on collection, storage and transportation, and someone will argue that a destination facility's inbound pile is storage inside that override. Whether that argument wins, I don't know, and I haven't found anyone who has tested it. If you're underwriting a battery recycling line in 2027 on the strength of this bill, that's the question to put to counsel before you put it to a lender.

Disclosure: I'm a senior plant engineer at Renewable Waste Energy, which builds and operates thermal conversion facilities, so I have a direct stake in battery streams staying out of my feedstock.

Sources & Notes

• Every section and paragraph reference above is to the engrossed text, H.R. 9615 as passed by the House on September 15, 2026, published by GPO. It's short, and worth reading rather than summarized.
• On how EPA reads the existing regime, keep the May 24, 2023 ORCR memorandum open beside the bill. The Part B storage answer is question 13; the black mass and shredding answers are questions 10 and 11.
• Destination facility obligations sit at 40 CFR 273.60. The one-year accumulation limit the bill imports, together with its burden of proof and date-demonstration conditions, is 273.35, and the Battery Act sentence section 3 rewrites is 42 U.S.C. 14323.
• House passage of the three-bill package, the sponsors, and the $10 million authorization in H.R. 9616 were reported by Waste Dive. The fire count is from EPA 530-R-21-002 (2021), summarized on the agency's used lithium-ion battery page.
• Import reliance figures: USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026. Availability figures from the Baltimore RDF line come out of my own project records.