Faced with waves of retirements, the State Council last week passed an action plan to promote electric vehicle (EV) battery recycling, according to a Xinhua bulletin.
Details were not published but the plan called for more recycling regulation, and for speeding up work to establish and revise relevant standards, such as green design and product carbon footprint accounting, stated a Xinhua news piece.
China’s EV sales have soared since 2015. The following year, a policy began requiring carmakers to provide an 8-year or 120,000-km warranty for core components like batteries. As such, large numbers started to be retired last year. This year, the number of scrapped EVs is set reach 15-20 million, and the capacity of scrapped batteries will exceed 60 gigawatt-hours, Securities Daily reported.
This year to 2027 will see a small peak in power battery retirement, and from 2030 to 2032, there will be another, bigger peak, given the boom in sales since 2022, an industry insider told Shanghai Securities News.
Over 3 million tons of power and energy storage batteries will have been retired by 2030, Wang Xiaokang, president of the China Industrial Energy Conservation and Clean Production Association, told International Financial News.
China has been promoting the recycling of power batteries for more than a decade through policies and standards. By end 2024, more than 10 national standards had been issued. There are about 150 companies qualified to recycle power batteries in China, and more than 10,000 recycling service outlets have been established, found a 2024 report on the industry.
However, as of 2023, only a quarter of power batteries were being recycled to a high standard in the country, stated Shanghai Securities News.
Economic Daily suggested that China’s recycling regulations are insufficient: “Some companies with incomplete qualifications make profits by roughly processing old batteries, which not only affects the recycling rate of waste power batteries, but also brings environmental pollution and safety hazards.”
Read Dialogue Earth’s previous analysis on China’s EV-battery recycling challenge.