The world's first commercial lithium-ion battery was born in 1991. In the past 20 years, lithium batteries have been widely used in consumer electronics, automobiles, energy storage and other fields. How to dispose of used batteries has become a common problem faced by terminal equipment and battery manufacturers.
In recent years, as the battery life of the first batch of new energy vehicles is coming to an end, the first wave of power battery retirement is coming soon. Due to the rapid development of new energy vehicles in recent years, the amount of power battery retired will increase year by year. Based on the data of multiple reports, the retired power lithium battery will reach about 140GWh in 2025. With reference to the battery retirement policies of many countries around the world, electric vehicle manufacturers and battery manufacturers have successively become the main bodies of recycling responsibility.
At the same time, due to the landing of 5G technology, replacement of consumer electronics products for example mobile phones will also bring a large number of retired batteries.
A large number of discarded and retired batteries are produced every year. How to recycle them without polluting the environment has become the primary challenge faced by enterprises.
Batteries and their materials are flammable and explosive, and fires are more likely to occur during transportation. How to ensure the absolute safety of their logistics process?
Choose a more cost-effective recycling method to reduce the additional costs of non-essential links such as long-distance transportation.
How to obtain battery raw materials extracted through recycling, so as to improve the company's environmental protection attributes with recycled resources?
The retired power battery is tested, and the echelon or recovery is carried out according to the retained power data.
Discharge/disassemble/crush the retired or scrapped lithium iron phosphate, ternary power battery, cobalt lithium and other consumer equipment batteries with insufficient power, directly separate the shell metal, and then chemically refine the remaining materials. In this process, metals such as copper and aluminum are separated from the shell, which can be directly reused.
The positive electrode material and negative electrode material enter the refining process and are separated into lithium solution or nickel cobalt manganese purification solution according to the different materials of the battery.
After different processing techniques, products such as lithium carbonate, lithium chloride, and ternary precursor are produced.
The recovered ternary precursors, lithium salts and other products will be re-used in the production of power batteries, consumer equipment batteries or industrial processing after passing the quality inspection.
There are dozens of pretreatment centers nationwide, which can deliver retired batteries at close range. The pretreatment center is responsible for disassembling and smashing the batteries, thereby reducing potential safety hazards during subsequent transportation. At the same time, the materials obtained in the pretreatment stage can be deployed nearby.
Overseas battery recycling and processing networks are also actively planning to build plants on site and treat them nearby, which can better reduce the cost of recycling and processing and carbon emissions.
