On 19th May, CCTV News Channel's “Live News” column reported on the standardised recovery and dismantling of retired lithium batteries by Zhejiang Huayou Recycling Technology Co. (Hereinafter referred to as "Huayou Recycling"). As one of the first batch of retired power battery comprehensive utilisation compliant enterprises in China, Huayou Recycling adopts the disposal path of “first cascade utilisation and then recycling” around the fields of battery asset management, directional closed-loop recycling, cascade and regeneration, relying on the advantages of the integrated industrial chain of Huayou Cobalt, its parent company, to provide customers with key raw material closed-loop solutions, and builds a global lithium-ion battery recycling and dismantling system, which is the most advanced technology in the world.

With the replacement of new energy vehicles with old ones, lithium batteries, as their core components, will also usher in a large-scale wave of decommissioning. Last year, the total amount of retired lithium batteries in China exceeded 580,000 tonnes, and the figure is expected to be close to 800,000 tonnes by next year. That so many lithium batteries go where? And how to deal with it?

According to the national standard for new energy vehicles, the performance of power batteries will increase with the number of charging and attenuation. When the battery capacity declines to below 80% of the rated capacity, it is no longer suitable for electric vehicles. Qualified formal power battery recycling enterprises are needed for recycling and disposal. Why emphasise on formal enterprises?

Experts say that batteries in electric vehicles weigh hundreds of kilograms. When the vehicle is scrapped, the lithium hexafluorophosphate in the battery is easily hydrolysed in the air environment, producing harmful substances such as phosphorus pentafluoride and hydrogen fluoride, if not handled properly, which will cause environmental pollution. And decommissioned lithium batteries actually have high utilisation value.

At present, there are two modes of lithium battery recycling, cascade utilisation and recycling to extract raw materials. The former is to dismantle the battery reorganisation and apply it to energy storage and other areas; the latter is to extract the cobalt, nickel, lithium and other expensive metal materials in the end-of-life batteries, recycling and regeneration to become a new battery. As China's new energy vehicle industry continues to grow, the new energy vehicle power battery recycling industry is growing rapidly.

Zhang Ying, President of the Automotive Recycling Industry Development Committee of the China Association for Economic Development in Asia, said that at present, the recycling of power batteries has a whitelist of enterprises, which are classified into cascade utilization enterprises and recycling enterprises, including the recycling outlets constructed by host factories. At present, there are more than 15,000 recycling outlets across the country, basically covering more than 85% of the market for new energy vehicles.

In the world's first “zero-carbon” factory for cascade utilisation and recycling in Huayou Cobalt Quzhou Industrial Park, the reporter saw that in the flexible automated dismantling line for battery packs, retired batteries are dismantled and the valuable renewable resources are extracted, and eventually recycled into the production of new battery materials. Here can handle 65,000 tonnes of waste battery materials per year.

According to the China Renewable Resources Recycling Association, the net increase in the amount of automobiles scrapping in 2023 will be 7.56 million units, an increase of 32% year-on-year; the amount of regulated recycling of used home appliances and other products will be about 93 million units, weighing about 4.4 million tonnes; the amount of recycling of used furniture will be more than 200 million pieces, of which the amount of recycling of ten major categories of renewable resources such as scrap iron and steel, waste non-ferrous metals, and waste plastics will be about 392 million tonnes. The role of support and guarantee for national resource security continues to be highlighted.