The economic benefits of lithium battery recycling

For retired power batteries, there are currently two feasible treatment methods: one is cascade utilization, and the power lithium batteries that are about to be retired are used in other fields such as energy storage as carriers of electric energy, so as to give full play to the residual value; The second is dismantling and recycling, which is about discharging and dismantling retired batteries to extract raw materials to achieve recycling. At present, only lithium iron phosphate batteries can exert their residual value through cascade utilization, and batteries of ternary materials are still mainly dismantled and recycled.

Due to the late large-scale application of lithium batteries and the small number of scrapped lithium batteries in the early stage, the lithium battery recycling industry is still in its infancy. In 2021, the theoretical recycling volume of lithium batteries in my country will reach 597,000 tons, while the actual recycling volume will be 236,000 tons, accounting for 38.5% of the actual recycling volume. With the expansion of China's new energy vehicle market, the installed capacity of power batteries has increased year by year. At the same time, the application of lithium batteries in power tools, 3C electronics, electric two-wheelers and other fields has also continuously promoted the rise of lithium battery shipments. These batteries are approaching their service life, and the amount of scrapped lithium batteries will further increase in the future.

Because the battery capacity of the power battery will gradually decay during the cyclic charge and discharge process, when the decay is below 80%, the power battery will reach the retired state. Nickel, cobalt, manganese, lithium and other elements in lithium batteries can be recycled and have obvious economic value. After dismantling and recycling, they can be further used to produce ternary precursors and cathode materials, realizing a closed loop of the industrial chain and effectively reducing battery costs. . Under the background that the price of upstream materials for lithium batteries continues to rise and the upstream metal resources are increasingly scarce, the economic benefits of lithium battery recycling will become more prominent.

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