Designing Batteries for a Safer, Cleaner Future

Smarter battery design is opening up new ways to cut waste, improve safety, and keep critical materials in use for longer. By building circularity into batteries from the start, Australian manufacturers are showing how design can turn today’s recycling challenge into tomorrow’s competitive advantage.

That is the approach behind Vaulta, a Brisbane manufacturer building lithium batteries with disassembly built in from the start. By designing for repair, recovery and recycling at the outset, the company is creating batteries that are easier to take apart, easier to service, and easier to recover at end of life.

"Australia has world-class battery engineering capability. This product proves it. We've built something that matches the sustainability, safety, and serviceability standard the industry should be held to," said Dominic Spooner, Founder and CEO of Vaulta.

Australians use around 350 million batteries a year, approximately 13 per person, and the overwhelming majority end up in landfill. Lithium battery fires are now among the country’s fastest-growing fire risks. Collection systems matter, but they only solve part of the problem. If a battery cannot be safely disassembled, recovery at end of life will always remain a challenge.

Vaulta's answer to that challenge is a new battery system launching in the coming weeks, developed and refined at ARM Hub in Brisbane, integrating fire suppression at the cell level where thermal runaway actually starts. Every component is repairable for the full 10-year life of the product, down to individual cells, without specialised tooling. The packaging contains no soft plastics, and a disassembly guide ships inside every unit.

The system also includes PlainView, a monitoring platform that tracks each cell individually. Dominic says PlainView’s like a fitness tracker, but for batteries: "It shows you exactly what’s going on inside each battery, across any brand, in real time. So you can spot any issues early, keep things running safely, and know exactly how much life is left."

The system logs the battery's full history, and flags anomalies before they become failures, "because a battery you cannot see is a liability you cannot manage".

The design has been proven across multiple deployments. When Cyclone Alfred bore down on South East Queensland in March 2025, a Vaulta system kept power running throughout the event at a family-run property on Moreton Island. An off-grid installation in northern NSW was subsequently upgraded with a further 43 kWh of capacity. A permaculture farm in Lismore chose Vaulta specifically because the battery is repairable.

"Vaulta is demonstrating that responsible design and commercial viability are the same priority," said Professor Cori Stewart, CEO of ARM Hub. "This is what Australian-made should mean."