Mar 27 2019
Chinese electric vehicle battery manufacturers are gradually concentrating on recycling as part of a sustainable life cycle approach.
"Greener manufacturing, increased metals extraction, better materials and recycling are all major parts of sustainability for electric vehicle batteries," Dr. Xiao LIN, associate professor of the Institute of Process Engineering at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told participants at a battery metals conference in Perth.
Waste management, metals recycling, and materials engineering are important factors in sustainable engineering.
Dr. Xiao LIN, Associate Professor, Institute of Process Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences.
He added that a pilot plant has been founded in China to recycle battery grade lithium, cobalt, nickel, and manganese from used batteries and from scrap material.
Lin emphasized the need for risk to be minimized from waste and spent batteries by "getting metal back". He also established that the used battery composition is changing to high nickel from original high cobalt of mineral resource and traditional Lithium ion battery composition, innovative metal separation processes and higher selective extraction systems are required to guarantee the recycling of the new waste, in agreement with the resource endowment change of the recovered materials. He states it is likely that there are 20 nickel-cobalt-manganese battery projects in progress in China.
While there is a large north-south split in the world with the raw materials situated in the southern hemisphere and battery manufacturing in the northern hemisphere (primarily east Asia), he said upstream and downstream changes are happening.
CATL has touched an estimated market value of AU$41bn after it was set up in December 2011. Substantial investment has been declared in battery manufacturing facilities, mostly by large Asian manufacturers such as CATL, LG Chem, and BYD.
A huge change, said Lin, is that Germany is expected to garner more battery manufacturing investment in 2019 than China, while Indonesia is developing as a major raw material producer through laterite nickel and high-pressure acid leach projects followed by China’s Tsingshan, the world’s largest stainless steel producer.