内容来源：https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/12/18/1130148/china-ev-battery-recycle/

内容总结：

中国电动汽车电池退役潮来临，正规回收体系面临灰色市场挑战

随着中国早期电动汽车逐步进入淘汰期，首批大规模装车的动力电池正面临“退役潮”。行业数据显示，2025年中国退役动力电池总量预计达82万吨，到2030年将攀升至百万吨级。这给尚未完全成熟的电池回收行业带来了巨大压力，同时也催生了大量不规范回收的灰色产业链。

以北京车主王磊（化名）为例，他于2016年购买的电动汽车在2025年因电池容量明显衰减决定出售。通过短视频平台联系到郊区一家小型回收商后，他以8000元价格卖出旧车，加上政府报废补贴，共获得约2.8万元。他的经历正是当前大量早期电动车主的缩影。

目前，退役电池主要有两条出路：一是梯次利用，将检测后符合条件的电池包用于储能、低速车等场景；二是拆解回收，提取锂、钴、镍等有价金属重新用于电池生产。这两条路径若规范运行，均需较高的技术和环保投入。

然而，市场上存在大量无资质的小作坊式回收点。它们往往通过省去环保、安全、税务等合规成本，以更高价格从车主手中收购电池，再进行粗暴拆解或简单翻新，甚至将废旧电池伪装成“新电池”出售，产生的废水废料直接排放，带来严重环境和安全风险。

为规范行业，中国工信部自2018年起已发布五批共156家符合《新能源汽车废旧动力蓄电池综合利用行业规范条件》的“白名单”企业。头部电池企业和整车厂也纷纷布局闭环回收体系。例如，宁德时代通过子公司邦普构建了覆盖240多个收集网点的回收网络，年处理能力约27万吨；比亚迪、吉利等车企也推出了电池回收或以旧换新计划。

但行业仍面临严峻挑战：一方面，近五年已有超过400家中小电动汽车品牌在激烈竞争中退出市场，其售出车辆的电池回收责任难以追溯；另一方面，正规回收网络的覆盖和处理能力尚无法完全消化快速增长的退役电池量。

业内专家指出，中国作为全球最大的电动汽车生产和消费国，亟需加快建立覆盖电池全生命周期、可追溯的大规模回收利用体系，避免大量退役电池继续流入灰色市场，从而真正实现新能源汽车产业的绿色闭环。

中文翻译：

中国已掌握了电动汽车的销售之道，如今却面临电池的"安葬"难题。

随着早期电动汽车逐渐老化，数十万块废旧电池正涌入市场，催生出一个灰色的回收产业。尽管政府与大型制造商正加紧构建更有序的回收体系，这一灰色市场仍在持续扩张。

2025年8月，39岁的王磊决定告别他的电动汽车。2016年购买这辆国产紧凑型电动车时，北京街头的电动汽车仍属新鲜事物。当时购车补贴丰厚，销售员以"支持自主创新"为宣传点，身边仅有少数人驾驶电动车，王磊很享受这种超前体验。

但如今，随着电池健康度下降，车辆续航明显缩短。虽然可以更换电池，但保修期已过，成本与手续让他觉得得不偿失。加之渴望升级车辆，卖车成为自然选择。

在抖音频繁刷到本地电池回收广告后，王磊开始付诸行动。他咨询多家回收点，最终由城郊一家小作坊开出最高价。通过微信联系后，对方次日便上门收车。他获得8000元回收款，加上政府提供的旧车报废补贴，最终到手约2.8万元。

王磊的选择折射出时代洪流。过去十年，在政策推动下中国迎来电动汽车爆发式增长。购买电动车已从新鲜尝试变为日常选择——截至2025年底，新能源车在新车销售中占比接近60%。

随着首批电动汽车电池寿命渐尽，早期车主开始淘汰旧车，如何处置这些老化部件已成为紧迫课题。这对尚在发展中的电池回收行业造成压力，并催生了常漠视安全环保标准的灰色市场。尽管国家监管机构与商业企业正在建立正规回收网络与回收计划，但现有体系仍难以消化汹涌而来的废旧电池。

与手机、笔记本电脑电池类似，当前电动汽车主要采用锂离子电池组。其容量每年衰减，导致充电变慢、续航缩短、安全隐患增加。三位电动汽车零售与电池回收从业者向《麻省理工科技评论》透露，当电池容量衰减至80%以下时，通常被视为需要退役。研究机构EVtank估算，2025年中国退役动力电池总量将达82万吨，到2030年将攀升至百万吨级。

日益增长的废旧电池正在考验中国尚未完善但快速扩张的回收生态。截至2025年11月底，中国电池回收相关企业已近18万家，其中3万余家为2025年新注册，超六成企业成立不足三年——这还未计入无监管的小作坊灰色市场。

电动汽车电池退役后主要有两种去向：一是梯次利用，经检测后用于储能系统或低速车辆等要求较低的场景；二是完全回收，拆解电芯提取锂、镍、钴、锰等金属用于制造新电池。这两种正规处理方式均需大量前期投资，小型厂商往往难以承担。

据三位业内人士透露，非正规回收点因规避环保、消防、污水处理、合规及税收等成本，能向消费者提供更高报价。曾在2022至2024年任职于多家无证作坊的电池回收工人林加瑞透露："工人直接拆开电池组，重组电芯后包装出售。"翻新电池有时甚至被冒充"全新"销售。对于严重老化或损坏的电池，工人会直接粉碎后按重量卖给稀有金属提炼商。"整个过程非常粗放，浸泡电池的废水经常直接排入下水道。"

管理不善的电池废料可能释放有毒物质，污染水土并引发火灾爆炸风险。因此中国政府一直致力于引导电池进入正规回收渠道。自2018年起，工信部已发布五批共156家合规回收企业"白名单"。尽管如此，面对快速增长的废旧电池，正规回收率仍然偏低。

中国不仅是全球最大电动汽车市场，更已成为电动汽车及其电池的核心制造基地。国际能源署报告显示，2024年中国占全球电动汽车产量超70%、销量过半，宁德时代与比亚迪等企业合计占据全球近半数动力电池产能。这些龙头企业正在为旧电池处置提供解决方案：通过经销商与4S店，许多车企推出回收计划或以旧换新折扣方案。

比亚迪每年处理数千个报废电池包，并与专业回收企业合作开展材料再生项目；吉利构建了涵盖报废车辆拆解、动力电池梯次利用、金属材料高回收率的"循环制造"体系；宁德时代通过子公司邦普建成行业最完善的回收系统之一，拥有超240个收集网点，年处理废旧电池约27万吨，镍钴锰金属回收率超99%。

"没有比制造商更懂如何处理这些电池的机构了，"上海电池工程师亚历克斯·李指出，制造商深谙电池化学特性、供应链及材料再生路径，"车企和电池制造商最终需要构建闭环体系。"但并非所有消费者都能获得原厂支持——过去五年价格战导致超400个中小电动汽车品牌破产，目前仅存约100个活跃品牌，许多消失品牌的车主已无法获得原厂回收服务。

分析师预测，随着补贴时代购入的首批电动汽车集中进入淘汰期，未来数年将有更多二手电池涌入市场。李工程师强调："中国亟需加速建立覆盖电池追溯、规模化梯次利用与再生回收的全生命周期管理体系，而非任其大量流入灰色市场。"

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英文来源：

China figured out how to sell EVs. Now it has to bury their batteries.
As early electric cars age out, hundreds of thousands of used batteries are flooding the market, fueling a gray recycling economy even as Beijing and big manufacturers scramble to build a more orderly system.
In August 2025, Wang Lei decided it was finally time to say goodbye to his electric vehicle.
Wang, who is 39, had bought the car in 2016, when EVs still felt experimental in Beijing. It was a compact Chinese brand. The subsidies were good, and the salesman talked about “supporting domestic innovation.” At the time, only a few people around him were driving on batteries. He liked being early.
But now, the car’s range had started to shrink as the battery’s health declined. He could have replaced the battery, but the warranty had expired; the cost and trouble no longer felt worth it. He also wanted an upgrade, so selling became the obvious choice.
His vague plans turned into action after he started seeing ads on Douyin from local battery recyclers. He asked around at a few recycling places, and the highest offer came from a smaller shop on the outskirts of town. He added the contact on WeChat, and the next day someone drove over to pick up his car. He got paid 8,000 yuan. With the additional automobile scrappage subsidy offered by the Chinese government, Wang ultimately pocketed about 28,000 yuan.
Wang is part of a much larger trend. In the past decade, China has seen an EV boom, thanks in part to government support. Buying an electric car has gone from a novel decision to a routine one; by late 2025, nearly 60% of new cars sold were electric or plug-in hybrids.
But as the batteries in China’s first wave of EVs reach the end of their useful life, early owners are starting to retire their cars, and the country is now under pressure to figure out what to do with those aging components.
The issue is putting strain on China’s still-developing battery recycling industry and has given rise to a gray market that often cuts corners on safety and environmental standards. National regulators and commercial players are also stepping in, building out formal recycling networks and take-back programs, but so far these efforts have struggled to keep pace with the flood of batteries coming off the road.
Like the batteries in our phones and laptops, those in EVs today are mostly lithium-ion packs. Their capacity drops a little every year, making the car slower to charge, shorter in range, and more prone to safety issues. Three professionals who work in EV retail and battery recycling told MIT Technology Review that a battery is often considered to be ready to retire from a car after its capacity has degraded to under 80%. The research institution EVtank estimates that the year’s total volume of retired EV batteries in China will come in at 820,000 tons, with annual totals climbing toward 1 million tons by 2030.
In China, this growing pile of aging batteries is starting to test a recycling ecosystem that is still far from fully built out but is rapidly growing. By the end of November 2025, China had close to 180,000 enterprises involved in battery recycling, and more than 30,000 of them had been registered since January 2025. Over 60% of the firms were founded within the past three years. This does not even include the unregulated gray market of small workshops.
Typically, one of two things happens when an EV’s battery is retired. One is called cascade utilization, in which usable battery packs are tested and repurposed for slower applications like energy storage or low-speed vehicles. The other is full recycling: Cells are dismantled and processed to recover metals such as lithium, nickel, cobalt, and manganese, which are then reused to manufacture new batteries. Both these processes, if done properly, take significant upfront investment that is often not available to small players.
But smaller, illicit battery recycling centers can offer higher prices to consumers because they ignore costs that formal recyclers can’t avoid, like environmental protection, fire safety, wastewater treatment, compliance, and taxes, according to the three battery recycling professionals MIT Technology Review spoke to.
“They [workers] crack them open, rearrange the cells into new packs, and repackage them to sell,” says Gary Lin, a battery recycling worker who worked in several unlicensed shops from 2022 to 2024. Sometimes, the refurbished batteries are even sold as “new” to buyers, he says. When the batteries are too old or damaged, workers simply crush them and sell them by weight to rare-metal extractors. “It’s all done in a very brute-force way. The wastewater used to soak the batteries is often just dumped straight into the sewer,” he says.
This poorly managed battery waste can release toxic substances, contaminate water and soil, and create risks of fire and explosion. That is why the Chinese government has been trying to steer batteries into certified facilities. Since 2018, China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has issued five “white lists” of approved power-battery recyclers, now totaling 156 companies. Despite this, formal recycling rates remain low compared with the rapidly growing volume of waste batteries.
China is not only the world’s largest EV market; it has also become the main global manufacturing hub for EVs and the batteries that power them. In 2024, the country accounted for more than 70% of global electric-car production and more than half of global EV sales, and firms like CATL and BYD together control close to half of global EV battery output, according to a report by the International Energy Agency. These companies are stepping in to offer solutions to customers wishing to offload 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 new one.
BYD runs its own recycling operations that process thousands of end-of-life packs a year and has launched dedicated programs with specialist recyclers to recover materials from its batteries. Geely has built a “circular manufacturing” system that combines 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 one of the industry’s most developed recycling systems through its subsidiary Brunp, with more than 240 collection depots, an annual disposal capacity of about 270,000 tons of waste batteries, and metal recovery rates above 99% for nickel, cobalt, and manganese.
“No one is better equipped to handle these batteries than the companies that make them,” says Alex Li, a battery engineer based in Shanghai. That’s because they already understand the chemistry, the supply chain, and the uses the recovered materials can be put to next. Carmakers and battery makers “need to create a closed loop eventually,” he says.
But not every consumer can receive that support from the maker of their EV, because many of those manufacturers have ceased to exist. In the past five years, over 400 smaller EV brands and startups have gone bankrupt as the price war made it hard to stay afloat, leaving only 100 active brands today.
Analysts expect many more used batteries to hit the market in the coming years, as the first big wave of EVs bought under generous subsidies reach retirement age. Li says, “China is going to need to move much faster toward a comprehensive end-of-life system for EV batteries—one that can trace, reuse and recycle them at scale, instead of leaving so many to disappear into the gray market.”
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