Photo by: CATL<\/p>\n China is a global leader in both EV battery production and recycling<\/a>. It recently implemented new stricter EV battery recycling standards and is also pushing for global adoption of these standards. When China\u2019s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) first proposed these standards in 2019, it specified that 85% of the lithium that goes into these batteries<\/a> should be recovered, but this was increased to 90% in 2024. Other reports indicate researchers in China are making big breakthroughs<\/a> in this arena.\u00a0<\/p>\n China\u2019s biggest EV battery recycler is Guangdong Brunp Recycling Technology<\/a>, a subsidiary of battery manufacturing giant CATL. The company says it has a fully automated recycling process that can handle 120,000 tons of waste batteries and is working to increase that capacity to 1 million tons. It says it has over 200 recycling locations in operation today and that it handles just over 50% of China\u2019s EV battery recycling needs.<\/p>\n It\u2019s worth noting that it\u2019s not clear if the 99.6% recovery rate has been achieved at scale or just in lab testing. It\u2019s probably the latter, and if the recovery process is energy-intensive, it will therefore create a lot of pollution. Some Chinese recyclers use acid leaching (hydrometallurgy) to recover lithium and other elements at a very high purity level, and while this reduces energy needs, it also requires treatment of the wastewater, which is a step that some companies might be willing to overlook to cut costs.<\/p>\n Targets for rare earths, copper and aluminum have also since been introduced. They need to have a recovery rate of 98%, which is the same as for nickel, cobalt and manganese. Some companies are already exceeding these recovery percentage guidelines and are able to retrieve over 99% of these key materials.<\/p>\n The figure is specifically 99.6% for nickel, manganese and cobalt and slightly lower, at 98%, for lithium. The standards don\u2019t just apply to electric passenger vehicle batteries, but also to batteries used in energy storage, marine applications and other uses.<\/p>\n These recycled materials will naturally be reused in new battery packs, automatically lowering the demand for virgin materials. One of the most controversial areas surrounding electric vehicles today is the environmental impact<\/a> of digging up lithium, rare earths and other elements out of the ground. The labor behind mining for these elements is not always ethical, and it affects natural habitats, so recovering these materials instead of getting new ones will become increasingly important in the future as more vehicles become electric.<\/p>\n The European Union wants to pass a law where any battery with a capacity higher than 2 kilowatt-hours will have to contain certain percentages of recovered materials by 2031\u201416% for cobalt and 6% for lithium and nickel. The aim is to reduce waste, promote a circular economy and reduce environmental impact. By 2031, the EU also wants to increase recovery rates for cobalt, copper, lead and nickel to 95% and 80% for lithium. All numbers that are lower than what China says it\u2019s capable of retrieving today.<\/p>\n China will likely remain the leader in both production and recycling of EV batteries, and as it amasses more of these elements, most of which are not mined locally, its need for freshly mined virgin materials will go down. This will allow China to essentially close the loop and become virtually independent and self-sufficient, relying solely on high-yield recycling of millions of existing EV batteries rather than bringing in raw materials from places like Africa or South America.<\/p>\n In the U.S., Redwood Materials<\/a> is one of the biggest battery recyclers. It says it too has technology to allow it to recover up to 95% of the nickel, cobalt, lithium and copper from an end-of-life EV battery pack<\/a>, but it has yet to do it at scale. The company wants to use these recovered materials to create new battery packs and is targeting a production capacity of 500 GWh by the end of the decade.<\/p>\n Reuters<\/a> noted back in 2023 that the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act included \u201ca clause that automatically qualifies EV battery materials recycled in the U.S. as American-made for subsidies, regardless of their origin.\u201d The goal was to incentivize EV battery recycling in the U.S., in an attempt to break China\u2019s almost total global monopoly in the field.\u00a0<\/p>\n With the Trump administration now stripping back incentives for EVs, batteries and\u00a0their supporting industries<\/a>, it doesn\u2019t look like China\u2019s battery recycling leadership will be challenged anytime soon. As time progresses and more vehicles on the road become electric, and as the ones that are on the road today begin to age, the need for battery recycling will increase considerably. <\/p>\n Will the West’s spent EV packs end up being shipped to China to be recycled?<\/p>\n \n \t\tWe want your opinion!\n\t<\/p>\n What would you like to see on Insideevs.com?<\/p>\n![\"screenshot-2025-10-20-at-125904\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/screenshot-2025-10-20-at-125904.png\")
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