China shouldn’t be only the world’s largest EV market; it has also turn out to be the primary global manufacturing hub for EVs and the batteries that power them. In 2024, the country accounted for greater than 70% of worldwide electric-car production and greater than half of worldwide EV sales, and firms like CATL and BYD together control near half of worldwide EV battery output, in line with a report by the International Energy Agency. These firms are stepping in to supply solutions to customers wishing to dump their old batteries. Through their dealers and 4S stores, many carmakers now offer take-back schemes or opportunities to trade in old batteries for discount when owners scrap a vehicle or buy a brand new one.
BYD runs its own recycling operations that process 1000’s of end-of-life packs a yr and has launched dedicated programs with specialist recyclers to get better materials from its batteries. Geely has built a “circular manufacturing” system that mixes disassembly of scrapped vehicles, cascade use of power batteries, and high recovery rates for metals and other materials.
CATL, China’s biggest EV maker, has created certainly one of the industry’s most developed recycling systems through its subsidiary Brunp, with greater than 240 collection depots, an annual disposal capability of about 270,000 tons of waste batteries, and metal recovery rates above 99% for nickel, cobalt, and manganese.
“Nobody is best equipped to handle these batteries than the businesses that make them,” says Alex Li, a battery engineer based in Shanghai. That’s because they already understand the chemistry, the availability chain, and the uses the recovered materials might be put to next. Carmakers and battery makers “must create a closed loop eventually,” he says.
But not every consumer can receive that support from the maker of their EV, because a lot of those manufacturers have ceased to exist. Up to now five years, over 400 smaller EV brands and startups have gone bankrupt because the price battle made it hard to remain afloat, leaving only 100 energetic brands today.
Analysts expect many more used batteries to hit the market in the approaching years, as the primary big wave of EVs bought under generous subsidies reach retirement age. Li says, “China goes to want to maneuver much faster toward a comprehensive end-of-life system for EV batteries—one which can trace, reuse and recycle them at scale, as an alternative of leaving so many to vanish into the grey market.”
