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The Worn-out Power Battery Recycling Market About to Explode

Although a number of new energy automobile enterprises promise consumers that the battery's service life and quality guarantee period may last about 10 years, the average life expectancy of power batteries is in fact more than 5 years if considering the usage environment and other factors. This means that the power battery recycling market is about to explode in 2018.

According to the forecast of the China Automotive Technology & Research Center, a cumulative 120,000-170,000 tons of power batteries for pure electric (including plug-in) passenger vehicles and hybrid passenger vehicles will be scrapped by around 2020.

Researcher Cao Hongbin with the Institute of Process Engineering, the Chinese Academy of Sciences said that electric vehicles may be scrapped after 3 to 5 years of use and if the retired automotive power batteries are not properly recycled and treated, it will not only cause a waste of resources, but pollute the environment.

Chinese power batteries are mostly lithium-ion batteries. The electrode materials of worn-out lithium-ion batteries, after exposed to the environment, may hydrolyze, decompose, oxidize and have other chemical reactions with other substances in the environment to produce heavy metal ions, alkali and negative carbon dust, causing heavy metal pollution, alkali pollution and dust pollution. Their electrolyte, after exposed to the environment, may hydrolyze, decompose, burn or have other chemical reactions to produce HF, arsenic compounds and phosphorus compounds, causing fluorine and arsenic pollution.

The consecutive introduction of a series of policies shows the government has attached great importance to the recycling of power lithium batteries. If the Automotive Product Recycling Technology Policy introduced in 2006 was only an early preparation for the recycling of power lithium batteries, then the Guiding Opinions on Speeding up the Development of the Renewable Resources Industry introduced 11 years later could be regarded as a "systematic deployment" for the recycling of power lithium batteries. But in actual practices, the recycling of power lithium batteries has not truly realized "industrialization".