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Cobalt Price — 10-Day Trend
All prices in ₹ per gram · daily rate, updated once per day
Batteries Don't Just Get Thrown Away
Every lithium-ion battery built with nickel-manganese-cobalt (NMC) chemistry is, in a real sense, a small deposit of refined metal waiting to be mined again. When these batteries reach end of life — whether from an electric vehicle, a laptop, or a phone — the cobalt, nickel and lithium inside them don't have to be lost. Recycling processes are specifically built to recover them, feeding a secondary supply stream that sits alongside newly mined cobalt priced today at ₹2.90 per gram.
The process itself starts crude and gets more refined at each step. Batteries are typically shredded into an intermediate material the industry calls "black mass" — a mixed powder containing the valuable metals along with other battery components — which is then processed, chemically or thermally, to separate and purify the individual metals back into a sellable form.
- Step 1: spent batteries collected and shredded into black mass
- Step 2: black mass processed to separate cobalt, nickel and lithium
- Step 3: recovered cobalt re-enters the market, often as sulfate for battery use again
Cobalt Price by Weight
Today's Cobalt rate is Three Rupees per gram. At this rate, 10 grams of Cobalt costs Twenty Nine Rupees.
| Unit | Weight | Price (INR) | Price in Words |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 Gram | 1.0000 g | ₹2.90 | Three Rupees |
| 8 Grams | 8.0000 g | ₹23.20 | Twenty Three Rupees |
| 10 Grams | 10.0000 g | ₹29.00 | Twenty Nine Rupees |
| 100 Grams | 100.0000 g | ₹290.04 | Two Hundred and Ninety Rupees |
| 1 Kilogram | 1,000.0000 g | ₹2,900.40 | Two Thousand Nine Hundred Rupees |
| 1 Ounce (oz) | 28.3495 g | ₹82.22 | Eighty Two Rupees |
| 1 Troy Ounce | 31.1035 g | ₹90.21 | Ninety Rupees |
| 1 Metric Ton | 1,000,000.0000 g | ₹2,900,397.00 | Twenty Nine Lakh Three Hundred and Ninety Seven Rupees |
Why Cobalt Specifically Makes Recycling Worthwhile
Not every battery material is worth recovering economically. What makes NMC-chemistry batteries attractive to recyclers is that cobalt and nickel are both relatively high-value metals compared to some of the more abundant materials elsewhere in a battery pack. That value is what funds the collection, shredding, and processing infrastructure in the first place — a battery chemistry built entirely from cheap, abundant inputs simply wouldn't support the same recycling economics.
The honest limitation: today's volumes are mostly scrap, not end-of-life batteries
It's worth being direct about where recycled cobalt actually comes from right now. The large majority of battery material being recycled today is manufacturing scrap — offcuts and rejected cells generated during battery production itself — rather than genuinely end-of-life batteries pulled from retired vehicles. That's simple arithmetic: most electric vehicles sold globally are still on the road, well within their working life, so the batteries that would eventually become the largest recycling feedstock haven't reached that stage yet.
This is expected to change meaningfully as the first large wave of EVs sold years ago starts reaching retirement, but treating today's recycling volumes as a preview of a much bigger future stream — rather than already being that stream — is the more accurate way to read where this market actually stands.
Cobalt Price — Last 10 Days
The most recent Cobalt price on record (2026-11-02) is Three Rupees per gram.
| Date | Price (INR/g) | Change |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-11-02 | ₹2.90 | 0.00 |
| 2026-11-01 | ₹2.90 | 0.00 |
| 2026-10-31 | ₹2.90 | 0.00 |
| 2026-10-30 | ₹2.90 | -0.10 |
| 2026-10-29 | ₹3.00 | 0.00 |
| 2026-10-28 | ₹3.01 | +0.01 |
| 2026-10-27 | ₹3.00 | 0.00 |
| 2026-10-26 | ₹3.00 | +0.01 |
| 2026-10-25 | ₹3.00 | 0.00 |
| 2026-10-24 | ₹3.00 | — |
How Recycling Connects Back to the Price on This Page
Recovered cobalt doesn't trade at some separate discounted "recycled" price — once it's processed back into a usable form, it competes directly against newly mined cobalt in the same market, priced against the same benchmarks covered elsewhere on this site. A recycler's business case depends on producing cobalt that's competitive against primary supply, not on selling a lesser substitute.
Longer term, growing recycling volumes represent a real, geographically distributed alternative to a supply chain that today leans heavily on one country's mines. That's a genuine structural shift worth watching as EV fleets age — though how large a share of total cobalt supply recycling eventually represents, and how quickly it gets there, isn't something that can be stated with confidence today.
Cobalt Recycling — FAQs
Yes. Lithium-ion battery recycling processes are specifically designed to recover cobalt, nickel and lithium from spent cells, typically by shredding batteries into an intermediate material known in the industry as "black mass" and then chemically or thermally processing that material to extract the individual metals.
Cobalt is one of the higher-value metals recovered in the recycling process, alongside nickel, which makes recovering it from a spent NMC-chemistry battery pack more economically worthwhile than recycling would be for a battery made almost entirely of cheaper, more abundant materials. That economic incentive is part of why cobalt-containing batteries specifically attract organized recycling infrastructure.
Not yet at large scale, and that's a straightforward math problem rather than a technology one: most electric vehicles sold globally haven't reached the end of their working life. Recycling volumes today draw mostly from manufacturing scrap generated during battery production rather than from genuinely end-of-life vehicle batteries, which will only become a large-scale supply source as the first big wave of EVs sold years ago starts reaching retirement.
Recovered cobalt, once processed back into a usable form, competes in the same broad market as primary cobalt and is priced against the same benchmarks — a recycler isn't selling a separate "recycled" price tier, they're selling cobalt that has to be competitive against material coming out of the ground.
