Finland's Fortum company recycles lithium-ion batteries with a recovery rate of over 80%

Gasco News According to foreign media reports, Finnish energy supplier Fortum is entering the lithium-ion battery recycling market. The company uses a process developed by Finnish Crisolteq and claims that it can recycle more than 80% of the material in each battery. The battery recovery rate on the battery is about 50%. Fortum expects that with the surge in demand for electric vehicles, the global battery recycling market will have a market value of at least 20 billion euros (approximately 23 billion U.S. dollars, 154.3 billion yuan) by 2025. Fortum’s recycling of batteries uses a hydrometallurgical process. First, the batteries can be safely processed mechanically by separating plastic, aluminum and copper, and the separated materials are allowed to enter their respective recycling processes; then, the cobalt, manganese, nickel and Lithium is recycled and returned to the battery manufacturer for use in the production of new batteries. In addition, Fortum is still using batteries to test 'secondary' applications. After such batteries are no longer suitable for applications such as electric vehicles, they have been eliminated as stationary energy storage devices. In February of this year, Volkswagen announced that it had started a pilot project for a battery recycling plant in Salzgitter, Germany. The company stated that its long-term goal is to recycle 97% of the material in each battery. The Belgian company Umicore is currently able to recycle about 150,000 to 200,000 electric car batteries. In modern times, batteries can and are being recycled, but compared to recycling, it is still cheaper to produce new lithium and cobalt. China hopes to force electric vehicle manufacturers to recycle used batteries. In the summer of 2018, China launched a pilot program for recycling used electric vehicle batteries in 17 cities and regions.