The recycling and reuse of power batteries has been subject to strict regulations.
According to the latest information released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the cumulative installed capacity of power batteries in my country has exceeded 131 GWh, ranking first in the world in terms of industry scale.
Considering that the lifespan of batteries is generally 5 to 8 years, the batteries of new energy vehicles promoted from 2009 to 2012 or those with long driving mileage are basically at the point of being phased out.
According to comprehensive calculations by the China Automotive Technology Research Center, the cumulative amount of scrapped batteries for pure electric (including plug-in hybrid) passenger vehicles and hybrid passenger vehicles in my country will reach 120,000 to 170,000 tons around 2020.
Such a massive amount of power batteries has reached the end of their service life. If they are not properly disposed of and their value not maximized, they will threaten public safety, cause irreversible environmental pollution, and waste valuable metal resources.
The recycling of power batteries is urgently needed.
On the eve of an industry boom
In 2018, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, together with seven other ministries, issued a series of new policies and regulations, including the "Interim Measures for the Management of Recycling and Utilization of Power Batteries for New Energy Vehicles," which foreshadowed that "power battery recycling" was about to enter a standardized management stage.
The "Survey Report on the Recycling and Utilization of Power Batteries for New Energy Vehicles" released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology on February 22 this year has once again put the prevention and control of pollution from scrapped power batteries on the agenda.
With the 2019 National People's Congress and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (NPC & CPPCC) sessions approaching, the China Zhi Gong Party, in its proposal entitled "On Accelerating the Upgrading and Development of the Full Life Cycle Value Chain of New Energy Power Batteries," explicitly suggested the introduction of a series of management measures and regulatory methods for the construction of service points, centralized storage, collection, labeling, packaging, and transportation of residual value batteries for secondary use, as well as designated transfer and dismantling.
It is also recommended that relevant authorities provide special funding to encourage upstream and downstream enterprises such as automakers, battery manufacturers, and recycling companies to form consortia to jointly build a new energy power battery recycling system.
Compared with national policies, the plans formulated by various localities are more detailed. The "Pilot Implementation Plan for the Recycling and Utilization of Power Batteries for New Energy Vehicles in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Region" released by the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei government in December 2018 proposed to build 2-4 demonstration lines for dismantling waste power batteries and cascade utilization plants by 2020.
Shenzhen has directly proposed that companies selling new energy vehicles should allocate a special fund of 20 yuan per kilowatt-hour for the recycling and disposal of power batteries. Companies that have already allocated this fund will receive a subsidy of 50% of the audited amount, with the subsidy specifically used for power battery recycling. Shenzhen has thus become the first city in China to establish a power battery recycling subsidy program.
Driven by such intensive policies, more and more companies are starting to target the "new cake" of the power battery recycling system. In fact, in 2018, the waste power battery recycling market reached a scale of 5 billion yuan, and from 2020 to 2023, the scale of the waste power battery recycling market will further grow to 13.6-31.1 billion yuan.
The recycling of power batteries is on the eve of its explosive growth.
A domestic recycling model needs to be established.
Currently, there are two main models for power battery recycling. One model involves OEMs using their sales channels to build a retired battery recycling system, which collects retired batteries and transfers them to comprehensive utilization companies for processing or collaborates with them to jointly utilize the remaining value of the batteries.
45 OEMs, including BAIC New Energy and GAC Mitsubishi, have established 3,204 recycling service outlets, mainly concentrated in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, the Yangtze River Delta, the Pearl River Delta, and other areas in central China with a high number of new energy vehicles. These outlets are primarily located in the form of 4S stores.
Another approach involves a third party, with recycling companies collaborating with automobile and battery manufacturers to jointly build and share recycling service outlets, centrally collecting retired batteries from the partner companies' new energy vehicles.
Among them, State Grid has built demonstration projects for cascaded utilization of lithium manganese oxide battery energy storage systems in Daxing and Zhangbei, Beijing, and established a technology platform for sorting and evaluating retired batteries, and developed an efficient and reliable battery management system.
Beijing Jiangxin has developed a cascaded photovoltaic energy storage system and is building a big data-based power battery pack evaluation system. Beijing Pride, in cooperation with BAIC and others, has implemented energy storage power station projects and containerized energy storage projects, with a cumulative cascaded utilization of approximately 75 MWh.
Companies like BYD and Guoxuan High-Tech are utilizing retired power batteries to produce second-hand batteries for backup power applications. Wuxi GEM and SF Express are exploring the use of second-hand batteries in urban logistics vehicles, while companies like Zhongtian Hongli are promoting the application of second-hand batteries in sanitation and sightseeing vehicles through a "lease-to-own" model.
It's worth noting that when the capacity of a power battery typically drops below 80%, it can no longer fully meet the power requirements of a vehicle, but it can be reused in other fields. However, due to the relatively small number of retired power batteries currently, most of these reuses are still in the experimental and demonstration stage, concentrated in areas such as backup power and energy storage.
In addition, there are still many problems in the field of cascade utilization, from ecological design and production control to information sharing. For example, there are still shortcomings in green material selection, standardization and universal design, easy disassembly structure design and easy cascade utilization design; there are still differences in the consistency of power battery products; upstream and downstream enterprises in the industrial chain have not yet formed a mechanism for sharing key resources such as communication protocols and historical data; and there are still technical bottlenecks in cascade utilization technology.
Unlike the secondary use of batteries, which is still in the exploratory stage, the waste battery recycling industry has already reached a certain scale. Specifically, in terms of dismantling, companies such as Hubei GEM and Hunan Bangpu have developed automated dismantling processes, while Beijing Saidemei has developed electrolyte and separator dismantling and recycling processes. Recycling mainly relies on hydrometallurgy and physical repair methods.
In hydrometallurgy, Hunan Bangpu has developed a "directional recycling and reverse product positioning" process, while Hubei GEM has developed a "liquid phase synthesis and high-temperature synthesis" process. In physical repair, Saidemei automates the disassembly, crushing, and sorting of battery cells, then uses material repair processes to obtain positive and negative electrode materials.
However, the aforementioned industries still face challenges such as low lithium metal recovery rates and limited compatibility in recycling various battery types. Currently, national and industry standards related to recycling are still being developed at an accelerated pace.
Overall, as a local branch manager of China Tower stated, "In actual operation, the business model for power battery recycling is not yet mature. Currently, the recycling and utilization of power batteries is in its initial stage."
Battery recycling programs in Germany, Japan, and the United States
In terms of battery recycling, Volkswagen's experience in Germany may be worth learning from. Countries including Japan and the United States have also begun to build their own battery recycling systems.
Volkswagen recently announced its entry into the recycling of power battery materials, with a short-term goal of recycling 1,200 tons of battery materials annually by 2020.
The plan will begin at the Salzgitter plant near Braunschweig, where Volkswagen has announced it is building a pilot production line to recycle existing battery components. It will reduce its carbon emissions by limiting electronic waste and the mining of virgin materials, while providing the battery materials needed for the company's planned 15 million electric vehicles over the next few years.
“For the past decade, we have been researching how to recover raw materials. The most important of these are cobalt, lithium, manganese, and nickel,” said Thomas Tiedje, head of technology planning at Volkswagen, which has a systematic accumulation of sustainable battery technologies and is further developing them.
It is understood that the first batch of batteries for Volkswagen's upcoming "ID" model series, built on the MEB platform, will be shipped later this year. Its recycling capacity is ready to be completed by 2020, with an initial target of recycling 1,200 tons of material annually, equivalent to 3,000 battery systems. Volkswagen anticipates that all batteries for its new electric vehicles will be fully recycled and reused.
“Because the scale of future automotive batteries will be enormous, we prefer to recycle them ourselves and build our own recycling capabilities and systems,” Tiedje said. Volkswagen’s long-term goal for battery recycling is to recover 97% of the raw materials, exceeding Volkswagen’s current 53%. The new Salzgitter plant will increase this percentage from the current 53% to 72%.
On the recycling path, EV batteries returned to Volkswagen will be evaluated for one of two pathways. The first is the "second life" option, which could include use in charging stations and energy storage. This could be used as backup power during large events or applied in fast-charging campaigns to provide power for electric vehicles on long journeys.
If a second lifespan cannot be selected, then the second option will be available: the EV battery will be recycled at Salzgitter.
“In this process, individual battery components will first be shredded, then the materials will be dried and sieved, and then the ‘black powder’ containing valuable cobalt, lithium, manganese and nickel raw materials will be extracted and separated separately, and then used again to produce new batteries.”
Volkswagen stated that across the group, its vehicles will require approximately 150 GWh of battery capacity annually by 2025, equivalent to approximately €50 billion in procurement costs. By choosing the circular economy option, the company says it will save on costly waste disposal and raw material purchases, thus the Salzgitter plant was designed from the outset with cost reduction in mind for Volkswagen.
At the same time, the project will also help to shield Volkswagen from market and geopolitical factors, such as the growth in global lithium demand needed to support the electric vehicle transition or the reduction in cobalt mining identified by producing countries.
In fact, similar to the general public's approach, major international and domestic automakers are explicitly stating their intention to get involved in the recycling of power batteries and materials, based on considerations such as cost, supply, and environmental protection. Automakers including Toyota, Daimler, BMW, and Nissan have all taken concrete steps in this field over the past few years, primarily through collaborations with battery and materials companies.
Meanwhile, many countries, including the United States, Japan, and Australia, are also making top-level designs and plans at the policy level:
In Japan, last September, the Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association and the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry jointly launched a battery recycling project with several Japanese automakers. The aim was to establish an efficient and sustainable battery recycling system, with costs shared by all parties. An organization called the Japan Automotive Recycling Cooperative will operate this joint venture funded by multiple automakers.
In the United States, the current collection and recycling rate of lithium-ion batteries is less than 5%. Recently, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) launched its first lithium-ion battery recycling center, called the ReCell Center. The DOE's goal is to reduce battery costs to $80 per kilowatt-hour (approximately 480 RMB) through the recycling and reuse of battery materials, and to recover 90% of key materials from collected batteries.
The ReCell Center's collaborators will focus on four key research areas to enable profitable lithium-ion battery recycling for industry adoption:
The first is direct cathode recycling, which will focus on developing recycling processes to produce products that can be directly recycled into new batteries without costly reprocessing; the second is recycling other materials, which will focus on creating technologies that can economically and efficiently recycle other battery materials, thereby providing additional revenue streams.
Third, recycling design will involve developing new battery designs and optimizing them to make future batteries easier to recycle; fourth, modeling and analysis tools will be developed and utilized to help guide effective approaches to R&D and validate the work within the center.
