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As electric vehicles (EVs) become increasingly common on roads around the world, a new challenge is emerging: what happens to their batteries when they reach the end of their useful life?

China, the world’s largest EV market, is already facing this question at scale. Industry estimates show that nearly 400,000 tonnes of retired EV batteries were generated in 2025, and that figure is expected to exceed one million tonnes annually by 2030.

Rather than viewing these batteries as waste, Chinese recycling companies are treating them as valuable urban mines. At a large recycling facility operated by Brunp Recycling, a subsidiary of battery giant CATL, discarded batteries are being transformed into high-quality materials that can be used to manufacture the next generation of EV batteries.

Giving Old Batteries a Second Life

At Brunp’s integrated circular economy industrial park in Yichang, Hubei Province, trucks carrying retired EV batteries arrive every day. Each battery pack is carefully inspected, sorted, and recorded before entering the recycling process.

Most of these batteries have degraded to less than 80 percent of their original capacity. While they can no longer deliver the performance required for modern electric vehicles, they still contain valuable materials such as lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese, copper, and aluminum.

In the past, weak oversight sometimes allowed retired batteries to re-enter the market through unauthorized channels, creating safety and environmental risks. To address this challenge, China launched a national traceability platform in 2026 that tracks every power battery throughout its lifecycle—from manufacturing and installation to retirement and recycling.

This digital tracking system helps ensure batteries are processed by certified recyclers and gives consumers greater confidence that their retired batteries will be handled responsibly.

Inside the Recycling Process

Once verified, battery packs move onto automated dismantling lines where robotic systems remove protective casings and separate battery cells.

Safety is a critical concern. Before further processing, each battery cell undergoes complete discharge to eliminate any remaining electrical energy.

The cells are then crushed into small fragments and sent through a series of specialized treatments. High-temperature pyrolysis under a nitrogen atmosphere helps break down materials while preventing unwanted reactions. Additional screening and sorting processes recover metals such as copper and aluminum for direct reuse.

What remains is a fine black powder known throughout the industry as black mass.

The Value Hidden in Black Mass

Black mass is the most valuable output of battery recycling. It contains concentrated amounts of critical battery minerals, including lithium, nickel, cobalt, and manganese.

Recovering these materials efficiently has long been one of the biggest technical challenges in battery recycling.

At Brunp’s hydrometallurgical facility, black mass is mixed with specially formulated acidic solutions inside large reaction tanks. The metals dissolve into a complex liquid mixture, creating what engineers sometimes call a “metal soup.”

Advanced separation technologies then isolate and purify each metal. According to the company, its direct recycling process achieves recovery rates of 99.6 percent for nickel, cobalt, and manganese, while lithium recovery reaches 96.5 percent.

These recovery rates represent a significant improvement over traditional recycling methods, which often suffered from lower efficiency, higher energy consumption, and larger volumes of waste residue.

Turning Waste into New Battery Materials

The purified materials are ultimately converted into battery-grade lithium carbonate and iron phosphate—two key ingredients used in lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries.

One of the most impressive aspects of the operation is its integration with nearby manufacturing facilities. Once regenerated, the materials are transported directly to neighboring plants where they are processed into new cathode materials for battery production.

The entire transformation—from retired battery pack to regenerated cathode raw material—takes only about one week.

Even more remarkable, batteries produced using recycled materials can perform at levels comparable to those made from newly mined resources. According to engineers at the facility, these batteries can support faster charging speeds, longer driving ranges, and lower-carbon manufacturing processes.

Building a Circular Battery Economy

Beyond recovering materials, the recycling process is helping improve future battery designs.

Engineers continuously share lessons learned from dismantling and material recovery with battery manufacturers. This feedback loop allows designers to create batteries that are easier to disassemble, recycle, and process at the end of their lives.

Recommendations include simplifying battery pack structures for automated dismantling and optimizing material compositions to improve future recovery and purification rates.

This approach creates a true circular economy: batteries are designed for recycling, recycled into raw materials, and then transformed into new batteries that can eventually re-enter the cycle.

The Road Ahead

As EV adoption continues to accelerate globally, battery recycling will become a critical pillar of the clean energy transition.

Recycling reduces dependence on newly mined raw materials, lowers environmental impacts, improves resource security, and helps create a sustainable supply chain for future battery production.

The journey from discarded battery to new energy storage device may begin with a substance called black mass, but it ultimately demonstrates something far more valuable: how innovation can transform waste into a strategic resource for a greener future.

This version is suitable for publication on a corporate sustainability blog, energy industry website, or technology news platform.