China's new energy battery recycling capacity is expanding rapidly. According to the recently released China New Energy Battery Recycling and Utilization Industry Development Report (2024), the country's comprehensive recycling volume reached 825,000 tons in 2023. By the end of October 2024, China had cultivated 148 standard-compliant enterprises across five batches, and set up more than 10,000 recycling service outlets in 327 prefecture-level cities nationwide.
Because retired batteries are typically auctioned to the highest bidder, "small workshops have long beaten the regular army," as the industry saying goes. In late June 2024, for instance, workshops paid around 22,000 yuan per ton for ternary aluminum-shell battery packs, versus roughly 19,000 yuan per ton offered by large enterprises — steering more waste batteries toward unlicensed players.
Although many small workshops have shut down recently, they still hold about half of the market," said Cao Guoqing, deputy secretary-general of the Resource Mandatory Recycling Industry Innovation Alliance. The Development Research Center of the State Council found that China's standardized power battery recycling rate was below 25% as of 2023.
Recycling follows two routes: batteries that decay to about 80% of initial capacity move into "echelon use" in energy storage and power tools, while fully spent packs are dismantled to recover lithium, cobalt and nickel.
The bottleneck is compliance. Because retired batteries are auctioned to the highest bidder, workshops that skip environmental and tax costs can pay more — about 22,000 yuan per ton for ternary aluminum-shell packs in June 2024 versus 19,000 yuan per ton from licensed firms — steering waste toward unregulated players.
Policymakers are responding. MIIT convened an industry-wide symposium in June 2024 and issued a revised industry specification (2024 draft) tightening sitting, capability, quality and environmental requirements. Experts urge faster standard-setting, stronger echelon-use technology and clearer corporate responsibility so the coming wave of retired batteries becomes an asset, not a liability, for the green transition.
