German Volkswagen opens a new plant to recycle used batteries, grinding particles to obtain raw materials

Lithium Grid News: As the electrification of automobiles increasingly becomes the 'general trend' in the future, the recycling of power batteries has become one of the major challenges that we have to face in the future.

Many automakers such as Volvo, Nissan and Renault are trying to reuse batteries in different ways. Let these batteries continue to glow and generate heat in high-speed charging stations or home/photovoltaic energy storage systems. However, these EV power equipment will eventually decline, until they are completely scrapped and useless.

This time Volkswagen is aiming at this kind of demand, and recently opened a new service in Salzgitter, Germany. A recycling plant hopes to recover raw materials from completely depleted batteries and then use them to make brand new batteries. Specifically, the factory's machines and workers will deeply discharge the completely scrapped EV power battery, and completely disassemble it, and then grind the individual parts into dry particles. Volkswagen hopes that this process can produce the raw materials needed for the production of new batteries, such as copper, aluminum, lithium, manganese, cobalt, and graphite, so as to achieve a more environmentally friendly closed loop of EV battery ecology.

'Through research, we know that recycled battery materials are as efficient as new batteries,' said Mark Mller, the technical development director of Volkswagen's parts department. 'In the future, we intend to use recycled materials to support our Battery production. In view of the substantial increase in demand for batteries and corresponding raw materials, we can make full use of every gram of recyclable materials.'

However, the initial recycling scale will not be too large. Volkswagen predicts that there will not be a large number of batteries that need to be recycled from electric vehicles in the past 10 years. Therefore, the Salzgitter plant will start as a pilot project, with the goal of recycling 3,600 sets of battery systems each year, and slowly expand the scale. .