China's EV Revolution Has a Big Problem: Battery Waste

China's electric-car revolution is about to collide with a far messier problem: what to do with all the worn-out batteries. What began as a heavily subsidized push to get drivers into EVs—nearly 60% of new vehicles sold in China by late 2025 were electric or plug-in hybrids—is now generating a growing wave of end-of-life battery packs, per MIT Technology Review. Once an EV battery's capacity falls below about 80%, it's typically considered ready for retirement. Research firm EVTank estimates China will discard 820,000 tons of EV batteries in 2025, with yearly totals expected to approach 1 million tons by 2030.

China's official recycling network is racing to catch up. Nearly 180,000 companies are now involved in battery recycling, most founded within the last three years, and the government has issued "white lists" of more than 150 approved recyclers. The idea is to steer batteries either into "cascade use"—repurposing them for slower, less demanding jobs like energy storage—or into full recycling, where metals such as lithium, cobalt, and nickel are pulled out for use in new batteries. Done properly, both options require investment in safety, pollution control, and compliance.

That cost gap has helped fuel an unregulated gray market of small workshops that can pay car owners more because they skip safeguards, according to people working in the sector. Employees may crack open packs and reassemble cells into new batteries, or simply crush unusable ones and sell the mix by weight, sometimes dumping contaminated wastewater in which the batteries were soaked directly into sewers. Major players like CATL, BYD, and Geely are trying to build closed-loop systems—offering take-back programs through dealers, running large recycling operations, and boasting high metal recovery rates—but many early EVs were made by brands that no longer exist, leaving consumers without official support.

Analysts say that as the first major generation of subsidized EVs hits retirement, China will need a far more comprehensive, traceable end-of-life system if it wants its battery boom not to become a waste crisis. Some see a wealth of opportunity in the prospect. "There is huge potential in the business of new-energy waste, because new energy is where China and the world are going," a sales manager with the Henan Hairui Intelligent Technology firm tells the South China Morning Post. France 24, meanwhile, takes a further look at how Beijing is approaching the recycling end of things.