Tesla is expected to produce about 746,000 metric tonnes (1.6 billion pounds) of waste in 2026 across the factories they run, car plants and battery and energy sites alike.
So how much waste does Tesla produce? Tesla's own reports answer that through 2025, with a total that nearly doubled in one year and a disposal share that has climbed from 8.5% to 20.9% since 2023.
Tesla's Impact Reports keep returning to one heading, that waste per vehicle falls as the factories get more efficient. By our estimate the plants will generate roughly 746,000 tonnes in 2026, and the last per-vehicle figure Tesla printed rose 49.7%.
Tesla's annual waste totals (2021-2026)
Tesla publish a waste table in the appendix of every full Impact Report, restated in metric tonnes from the 2023 edition onward. The five published years are below, with our projection for 2026 on top.
| Year | Total waste (tonnes) | Change on prior year |
|---|---|---|
| 2026 | 746,000 | +75,791 |
| 2025 | 670,209 | -29,482 |
| 2024 | 699,691 | +302,480 |
| 2023 | 397,211 | +44,845 |
| 2022 | 352,366 | +75,515 |
| 2021 | 276,851 | baseline |
Note: Figures to 2025 are Tesla's own, from their 2023 and 2025 Impact Reports. The 2026 row holds waste per vehicle at the 2025 rate and applies Tesla's first-half production growth of 11.3%, giving about 746,000 tonnes.
Production moved the other way over most of that period. Tesla built 1,845,985 vehicles in 2023 and 1,654,667 in 2025, about 10% fewer, while the waste total rose 69%.
The 2026 estimate rests on output recovering. Tesla built 860,144 vehicles in the first six months of 2026 against 772,859 a year earlier, and energy storage deployments grew at a similar pace, 22.3 gigawatt hours against 20.0, according to their quarterly production releases.
Waste for every Tesla built
Dividing each year's total by the vehicles Tesla built that year gives a company-wide rate. It is not the per-vehicle change Tesla print themselves, which is calculated on their own site boundary, but it uses only their two published series.
| Year | Kilograms of waste per vehicle built |
|---|---|
| 2026 | 405 |
| 2025 | 405.0 |
| 2024 | 394.5 |
| 2023 | 215.2 |
| 2022 | 257.3 |
| 2021 | 297.6 |
Note: Waste totals from the Impact Reports divided by the production Tesla report each January, 930,422 vehicles in 2021 rising to 1,845,985 in 2023 and back to 1,654,667 in 2025. The 2026 row holds the 2025 rate, which is the assumption behind the headline.
On this arithmetic a Tesla built in 2025 carried 405 kilograms of factory waste, roughly one tonne for every two and a half vehicles, and close to double the 215 kilograms of 2023. The rate fell for three years and then jumped in 2024, the year two more factories entered Tesla's count.
Who are Tesla?
Tesla is an American carmaker and energy company, headquartered in Austin, Texas. The company was incorporated in July 2003 by two engineers, Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning.
Elon Musk joined in 2004 as lead investor in Tesla's first funding round and became chairman of the board, a seat he held until 2018. He has been chief executive since October 2008, and Tesla's latest annual report says the company is highly dependent on his services.
In 2025 Tesla reported revenue of 94.8 billion dollars, built 1,654,667 vehicles, deployed 46.7 gigawatt hours of energy storage and employed 134,785 people at the year end.
Their annual report lists eight primary manufacturing sites, and these are the plants behind the waste table above.
- Fremont Factory in California, the original car plant, which Tesla themselves describe as their legacy site.
- Gigafactory Nevada in Sparks, where Tesla process and recycle battery material on their own line.
- Gigafactory Shanghai, the plant Tesla hold up as their benchmark for low waste per vehicle.
- Gigafactory Berlin-Brandenburg in Grünheide, Germany, and Gigafactory Texas in Austin, both counted in the waste figures only from 2024.
- Gigafactory New York in Buffalo and the two Megafactory sites in Lathrop, California, and Shanghai, which build energy products rather than cars.
A lithium refinery on the Texas Gulf Coast started up in January 2026, so it sits outside every figure on this page.
Where Tesla's waste ended up
Tesla split their waste six ways, by whether it is hazardous and by whether it was recycled, disposed of or incinerated. Their 2025 split of the 670,209 tonnes came out as follows.
| Where it went | Tonnes | Share of the total |
|---|---|---|
| Recycled non-hazardous waste | 464,591 | 69.3% |
| Disposed non-hazardous waste | 122,520 | 18.3% |
| Recycled hazardous waste | 50,489 | 7.5% |
| Disposed hazardous waste | 17,271 | 2.6% |
| Incinerated hazardous waste | 8,168 | 1.2% |
| Incinerated non-hazardous waste | 6,811 | 1.0% |
Note: All six rows are Tesla's own 2025 figures from the 2025 Impact Report appendix. They add up to 359 tonnes less than the published total of 670,209, a rounding gap in the source, so the shares above are taken against the published total.
Recycling took 515,080 tonnes, or 76.9% of everything the plants threw away. Two years earlier it took 89.0%, and in 2024 it took 84.9%, so the recycled share has fallen in each of the last two years.
The tonnage sent for disposal rose while the total fell
The disposal rows are where the 2025 table moved. Together they came to 139,791 tonnes, up 76% on the 79,420 tonnes of 2024, in a year when the overall total fell 4.2%.
Hazardous waste followed the same path. Tesla generated 75,928 tonnes of it in 2025, 11.3% of the total against 3.9% the year before, and the amount of hazardous waste they recycled more than quadrupled, from 12,038 to 50,489 tonnes.
Incineration is the smallest route at 14,979 tonnes. Counting it alongside recycling as material diverted from disposal, the way Tesla do when they quote a diversion rate, gives 79.1% for 2025 against the roughly 90% the company reported for 2024.
Why the total nearly doubled in one year
The 2024 total of 699,691 tonnes is 76% above 2023, in a year when Tesla built 4% fewer vehicles. Tesla explain the step themselves in the introduction to their key metrics, and it is a change in what was counted.
"This year, we expanded the scope of our environmental metrics to include Gigafactory Berlin-Brandenburg and Gigafactory Texas for the first time," the 2024 Impact Report says.
Both plants were already running in 2023, when Tesla's report described battery scrap being recycled at Texas and Berlin producing hundreds of thousands of vehicles a year. Neither was inside the waste table until 2024.
The rule that decides when a plant is counted
The boundary rule Tesla now print explains the lag. A site has to have been open on or before 1 January of the previous reporting year, and under Tesla's full operational control, before it enters the environmental metrics.
The 2021 table covered five sites, the Fremont Factory and its supporting facilities, Gigafactory Nevada, Gigafactory New York, Tesla Grand Rapids and Gigafactory Shanghai.
Adding the two newest car plants at once lifted the total by 302,480 tonnes and Tesla's own per-vehicle measure by 49.7%. How much of that step is extra waste and how much is the wider count, Tesla do not separate.
The yardstick Tesla changed
Until the 2024 report Tesla judged their waste per vehicle. From the 2025 report the appendix measures it against revenue instead, a change Tesla say gives "a more accurate, scalable and comparable view" as the product range and the energy business grow.
| Yardstick | Years | Last change |
|---|---|---|
| Waste per vehicle (Tesla) | 2021 to 2024 | +49.7% in 2024 |
| Waste per million dollars of revenue (Tesla) | 2023 to 2025 | -1.3% in 2025 |
| Waste per vehicle built (ours) | 2021 to 2026 | +2.7% in 2025 |
Note: The first two rows are Tesla's own intensity metrics as printed in the 2024 and 2025 Impact Report appendices. The third divides the published totals by the vehicles Tesla reported building each year.
On the revenue yardstick 2025 reads as an improvement, because revenue fell 2.9% and waste fell 4.2%. On the vehicle yardstick it reads as a rise, because production fell 6.7%, more than the waste did.
Tesla's 2025 report also states that "this year, we have decreased the average waste per vehicle across all global factories". Tesla do not print the number behind that sentence, so it cannot be set against the 405 kilograms above directly.
The two can differ because the company-wide total also carries sites that do not build cars, such as Gigafactory Nevada and Gigafactory New York.
Set against the German carmakers
Mercedes-Benz report 358.1 kilograms of waste per car built in 2025 and Volkswagen work out at 347.9 on the same division, so Tesla's 405 sits above both. BMW's 851,830 tonnes across 2,456,561 vehicles gives 346.8.
The comparison is loose. Tesla's total counts battery and energy-product sites alongside the car plants, and each German group draws its own boundary, so the four numbers read as a range rather than a ranking.
Shanghai against Fremont
Tesla have compared waste per vehicle at Gigafactory Shanghai with their older US plants in several reports. The latest printed figures, for 2024, set Shanghai against Fremont.
| Plant | kg per vehicle | Change |
|---|---|---|
| Shanghai | 152 | -6% |
| Fremont | 289 | -30% |
Note: Tesla's own 2024 figures for Gigafactory Shanghai and the Fremont Factory, from the 2024 Impact Report, set against 2023, when Shanghai stood at 161 and Fremont at 413. They are the only two plants for which Tesla publish a per-vehicle waste figure.
Tesla give two reasons for the gap. The car-part supply chain has little presence on the US West Coast, so components travel long distances to Fremont in protective packaging that becomes waste on arrival.
Newer plants are also laid out with trailer entry points around the whole building, so parts are unloaded where they are used.
Shanghai is also the plant Tesla cite for keeping waste out of disposal. Their reports say 7% of its waste was not recyclable in 2021, 6% was not recycled in 2023, and none of it went to disposal in 2024 or 2025.
Fremont holds a zero waste certification of its own, TRUE Gold, listed in both the 2023 and 2025 reports.
What Tesla says about their waste
Tesla's own account of their waste centres on batteries. The 2025 report says they recycled over 14,000 metric tonnes of battery material in 2025, in-house and through partners.
It adds that Tesla "maintains a 100% recycling rate for all lithium-ion batteries and manufacturing scrap, with no material components sent to landfills".
The figures Tesla publish on that programme are below.
| What Tesla count | Tesla's figures |
|---|---|
| Battery material recycled | over 14,000 tonnes in 2025, not given in tonnes for 2024 |
| Monthly throughput at Gigafactory Nevada | 590 tonnes in late 2024, over 500 in late 2023 |
| Sent to recycling partners | 5.3 gigawatt hours in 2024, 3 in 2023 |
| Processed in-house | 1.7 gigawatt hours in 2024, 650 megawatt hours in 2023 |
Note: All figures are Tesla's own, from the 2023, 2024 and 2025 Impact Reports. Tesla measure most of their battery recycling in gigawatt hours of cells rather than tonnes, so the rows cannot be added together, and the 2025 tonnage has no 2024 counterpart.
The process runs from shredded cells, the black mass that holds the nickel, cobalt, copper and lithium, back to battery-grade material for new cells, which is closed-loop recycling in the strict sense.
At Gigafactory Texas, aluminium scrap from the plant and wheels from scrapped non-Tesla vehicles are remelted into Model Y castings. Tesla say the plant's melt centre avoided about 2,000 tonnes of CO2 in their supply chain in 2025.
The rest of the factory
Batteries and their manufacturing scrap are one stream inside a 670,209-tonne total. Across the whole of that total, 76.9% was recycled in 2025 and 139,791 tonnes went for disposal, so the landfill statement covers battery material and not the plants as a whole.
Tesla also describe how they meet producer responsibility for batteries and for vehicles.
In 2024 they worked with over 130 compliance schemes across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia-Pacific and Canada, covering vehicles, batteries, electronics, packaging and tyres, and say their European dismantler network collects 100% of the high-voltage batteries returned to them at end of life.
Frequently asked questions about Tesla's waste
Below are the eight questions readers ask most often about Tesla's waste.
How much waste does Tesla produce each year?
Tesla's factories generated 670,209 tonnes of waste in 2025 and 699,691 tonnes in 2024, on Tesla's own figures. For 2026 we estimate about 746,000 tonnes, holding waste per vehicle at the 2025 rate as production recovers.
Does Tesla report a single total-waste figure?
Yes. Every full Impact Report carries an appendix table of waste generated in manufacturing, split into recycled, disposed and incinerated waste, each hazardous and non-hazardous. Since the 2023 edition the figures are in metric tonnes.
How much of Tesla's waste is recycled?
In 2025 Tesla recycled 515,080 tonnes, or 76.9% of the total. That share was 89.0% in 2023 and 84.9% in 2024, so it has fallen for two years running while the tonnage sent for disposal rose.
Why did Tesla's waste nearly double in 2024?
Mostly because the count widened. Tesla's 2024 report says Gigafactory Berlin-Brandenburg and Gigafactory Texas entered the environmental metrics for the first time that year, lifting the total from 397,211 to 699,691 tonnes.
How much waste does a Tesla factory produce per car?
Tesla print figures for two plants. In 2024 Gigafactory Shanghai generated 152 kilograms of waste per vehicle and Fremont Factory 289, both lower than the year before. Company-wide, the 2025 total works out at 405 kilograms per vehicle built.
How much battery material does Tesla recycle?
Over 14,000 metric tonnes in 2025, according to Tesla's 2025 Impact Report, through in-house processing and recycling partners. Tesla say they keep a 100% recycling rate for lithium-ion batteries and manufacturing scrap, with none of it going to landfill.
How does Tesla compare with other carmakers?
On a company-wide division Tesla's 2025 waste comes to 405 kilograms per vehicle built, against 358.1 at Mercedes-Benz and 347.9 at Volkswagen. Tesla's total also counts battery and energy-product sites, so part of the gap is boundary.
How do we estimate Tesla's waste for 2026?
We hold waste per vehicle at the 2025 rate of 405 kilograms and apply Tesla's own first-half production growth of 11.3%, which gives 1.84 million vehicles and about 746,000 tonnes. Every earlier year is Tesla's published figure.
Images: Steve Jurvetson, China News Service, China News Service
