We can no longer live without batteries in our daily lives. Batteries are found in smartphones, wireless headphones, pens, cars, submarines, high-speed trains, fighter jets, air suits and satellites, and all batteries have a life span.

In 2003, China's first dedicated policy on waste battery pollution prevention and control, the Technical Policy on Waste Battery Pollution Prevention and Control (hereinafter referred to as the Waste Battery Policy), was issued by the then State Environmental Protection Administration (now the Ministry of Ecology and Environment).

When buying an electric two-wheeler, if you choose the trade-in option, the trade-in can be about 300 RMB cheaper, the main residual value is on top of the battery and motor, the frame is almost obsolete and not worth much.

Apart from a small number of high-end two-wheeled electric vehicles, most models on the market today use lead batteries, a battery formula that has been used for a hundred years and is considered the evergreen of the battery industry, the lead inside can be recycled and remanufactured.

Inside the core are the shell, bonding agent, positive electrode, negative electrode, electrolyte and diaphragm, which consume a lot of energy and cost if dismantled and recycled separately, depending on whether the one-stop service is profitable or not.

The lithium and aluminium metal recovery rates are calculated as 90% and the cobalt-nickel-manganese recovery rate is 98% (nickel is the price per tonne of nickel sulphate), the rightmost column in the table below is the estimated value obtained for each lithium battery recycling metal. The US dollar exchange rate, converted at the beginning of December 2020, is approximately 6.55:1

As a preliminary calculation, we find that the recovered value of lithium iron phosphate and lithium manganate batteries is relatively low, while the recovered value of metal for both NCM and NCA is around $20,000 per tonne.

Let's assume that each car is equipped with a 50kWh capacity high-voltage battery pack with an energy density of 130Wh/kg, so shaving off the shell, BMS and other miscellaneous stuff, we get 0.384 tonnes of cells, which means that the metal value obtained from recycling a medium range electric car with ternary lithium power batteries is roughly 0.768 million yuan per vehicle. Although the price is not high, it at least confirms one point of information: the power cell is certainly the most valuable part of a used electric vehicle.

Initial estimates put the recycling price of a power cell at around $8,000