There will be more and more electric vehicles in the future. How to deal with the battery of electric vehicle?

In other words, pure electric vehicle manufacturers always claim that their production is "pure zero pollution and zero emission". But people will still feel a little fooled. After all, from manufacturing and using to scrapping a car, isn't it necessary to produce pollution such as waste water, harmful metals and plastics?

Especially in the process of manufacturing and recycling power batteries, deadly heavy metals are indispensable. If these things are not handled well, it is not only economic loss, but also irreversible damage to the environment.

So today, we will talk about where the retired power battery will go and whether it can be truly environmentally friendly.

Treatment method of waste power battery

At present, power batteries are mainly divided into ternary lithium batteries and lithium iron phosphate batteries, both of which contain heavy metals such as cobalt, nickel, manganese and lithium, among which cobalt and nickel are scarce mineral resources in China, and it will be a waste if they are not recycled.

At present, there are two mainstream ways to recycle power batteries, one is recycling (disassembling batteries to extract metals and raw materials), and the other is cascade utilization (secondary or even multiple use).

Let's talk about the first method. From a technical point of view, the recycling technology of waste power batteries is quite mature at present-first, it is completely discharged, and then the battery is disassembled to separate the positive electrode, negative electrode, electrolyte, diaphragm and other components. Then the electrode material is extracted after alkali leaching, acid leaching and impurity removal to realize the enrichment of valuable metals.

At present, the EU mainly uses pyrometallurgical-wet separation and purification, pyrolysis-wet purification, crushing-pyrolysis-distillation-pyrometallurgical method to extract useful metals, while domestic lithium battery recycling enterprises generally use pyrolysis-mechanical disassembly, physical separation, wet smelting and other methods for recycling.

The capacity of waste battery is decreasing, but it still has a certain energy storage capacity, and its life cycle is not over yet. They can also be used in energy storage market, light electric vehicles, spare batteries and so on. At present, many foreign car companies and institutions are exploring it, such as using it as a backup power supply for home or commercial buildings. That is, solar energy is used to charge during the day and valley electricity price is used at night, and electric energy is stored in the battery for daytime or emergency use.