With the trade-in of new energy vehicles, lithium batteries, as their core components, will also usher in a large-scale "decommissioning wave". Last year, the total amount of retired lithium batteries in China exceeded 580000 tons. It is expected that by next year, this figure will be close to 800000 tons. Where are so many lithium batteries? What should we do with it?
According to the national standard of new energy vehicles, the performance of power batteries will decline with the increase of charging times, and when the battery capacity declines to less than 80% of the rated capacity, it is no longer suitable for electric vehicles. Qualified regular power battery recycling enterprises are needed for recycling.
Why should we emphasize formal enterprises? Experts say the batteries of electric cars weigh hundreds of kilograms. When the vehicle is scrapped, the lithium hexafluorophosphate in the battery is easy to hydrolyze to produce harmful substances such as phosphorus pentafluoride and hydrogen fluoride in the air environment, which will cause environmental pollution if it is not handled properly. Moreover, decommissioned lithium batteries actually have high utilization value. at present, there are two modes of lithium battery recycling: echelon utilization and recycling to extract raw materials. After the battery is disassembled and reorganized, the former is applied to areas such as energy storage that do not require high energy density of the battery, while the latter is to extract expensive metal materials such as cobalt, nickel and lithium from scrapped batteries and recycle them into new batteries.
With the continuous growth of China's new energy vehicle industry, the new energy vehicle power battery recycling industry is growing rapidly.
Zhang Ying, director of the Automotive Recycling Industry Development Committee of the China Asian Economic Development Association: at present, there are whitelist enterprises for the recovery of power batteries, which are also divided into echelon utilization enterprises and recycling enterprises, including the recycling network built by the mainframe factory. At present, there are more than 15000 recycling outlets in the country, which can basically cover more than 85% of the entire market for the use of new energy vehicles.
Recycling and dismantling Lithium batteries of New Energy vehicles "get a New Life"
In Zhejiang Province, the world's first echelon utilization and recycling "zero carbon" factory, on this flexible automatic disassembly line of battery packs, scrapped batteries are disassembled and valuable renewable resources are extracted, and finally recycled to the production of new battery materials, where 65000 tons of waste battery materials can be treated every year.
At this power battery recycling enterprise in Foshan, Guangdong, professional treatment equipment can disassemble the power battery and extract the recycled material by chemical method.
Ou Yannan, head of a power battery recycling enterprise: the recovery rate of nickel, cobalt and manganese is 99.6%, and the recovery rate of lithium is 91%. It is remade into the cathode material of power battery and applied to new battery. it really realizes where the battery resources come from.
According to the statistics of the China Renewable Resources Recycling Association, the number of cars scrapped in 2023 increased to 7.56 million, an increase of 32 percent over the same period last year. About 93 million sets of waste household appliances were recycled, weighing about 4.4 million tons, and more than 200 million pieces of waste furniture were recycled. Among them, the recovery and utilization of 10 major types of renewable resources, such as scrap iron and steel, waste non-ferrous metals and waste plastics, has reached about 392 million tons, which continues to play a prominent role in supporting and ensuring the security of national resources.