The market for EV and energy storage battery recycling will exceed 1TWh by 2030 as EV and energy storage batteries are retired on a large-scale in the future, TrendForce estimates.
The scope of lithium iron phosphate battery recycling will account for more than a 58 percent share.
Several major problems remain to be solved in the battery recycling industry at this stage. First, it is still early in the development of the lithium-ion battery recycling industry and approximately 70 percent of used batteries come from defective products and waste from battery factories. The actual scale of recycling remains small.
Second, the number of participants in the battery recycling industry continues to rise and overall industry standardization still needs to be improved.
China has introduced several power battery recycling policies since 2020. More than 10,000 new battery recycling-related companies were registered in 2021, an approximate 4-fold increase compared to 2020. However, there were only 45 companies meeting the “Industry Standard Conditions for Comprehensive Utilization of Waste Power Batteries for New Energy Vehicles” issued by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of the PRC as of the end of 2021.
The annual production capacity of comprehensive waste battery treatment originating from companies has exceeded 1.01 million tons and the planned processing capacity of these companies exceeds 4.25 million tons. The actual recycled volume of lithium-ion batteries in China in 2021 was less than 300,000 tons, demonstrating the obvious idling capacity of the battery recycling industry.
Installed capacity of China in the power battery market will exceed 3TWh by 2030. China’s power battery installed capacity is expected to account for approximately 45 percent of the world’s total, according to TrendForce.