With the earliest batch of new energy vehicles coming into "retirement", the total number of retired power batteries in China reached about 200,000 tons in 2020, according to a CCTV weekend report.

That figure is expected to rise to about 780,000 tons by 2025, four times the amount in 2020, according to the report.

Amid the rapid growth of China's electric vehicle industry in recent years, power battery scrapping is also climbing rapidly, from 27,800 tons in 2017 to 63,900 tons in 2018, according to data released by the China Automotive Battery Innovation Alliance.

The figure will be about 136,500 tons in 2019 and more than 200,000 tons in 2020, both with an annual growth rate of about 100 percent.

Power batteries have their own upper limit of service life, and when the capacity decays to 80 percent, they are no longer suitable for car driving use.

The general theoretical life of new energy vehicle power battery can reach 8 years, corresponding to a mileage of 100,000 km, but in the actual use process, usually only 4-6 years of life.

China ushered in the new energy vehicle boom after 2013 and became the number one country in new energy vehicle production and sales for six consecutive years starting from 2015 to 2020. According to the upper limit of service life, China has already seen the first wave of power battery retirements in 2018.

Each new energy vehicle is typically loaded with a complete lithium battery pack. However, the battery poles vary in structure, and the packs can more often only be dismantled by hand, which is costly, according to the CCTV report.

In addition, each manufacturer sets read access to the battery's power management system in order to protect key technical information.

As the volume of power batteries in China grows, unifying the basic specifications of batteries as much as possible can bring benefits to multiple segments such as storage, dismantling, and security, the report quoted experts as saying.

The International Energy Agency expects the global lithium-ion battery recycling market to grow to 20 billion euros ($23.7 trillion) around 2030, with China becoming the largest market.

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