The first pilot power battery recycling plant opened, and Volkswagen Group launched the battery recycling program

On February, Volkswagen Group announced that its first pilot plant for recycling automotive power batteries in salzgit was officially opened. With the development of the project, Volkswagen Group is making further progress in realizing the end-to-end sustainable development of the whole value chain of power battery. The goal of the factory is to build a closed-loop management system for raw material recycling, and to industrialize the recycling of valuable battery raw materials such as lithium, nickel, manganese, cobalt, aluminum, copper and plastics. In the long run, the goal is to recycle more than 90% of the raw materials. The factory mainly recycles old batteries that cannot be used for other purposes. Before recycling the waste batteries, the factory will analyze and confirm whether the batteries still have enough power, and whether they can continue to be used in the mobile energy storage system such as flexible fast charging station or charging robot. Volkswagen Group expects that there will be a large demand for battery recycling by the end of 2020. Therefore, the initial plan of the plant is to recycle 3600 battery systems per year, equivalent to 1500 tons. In the future, with the continuous optimization of the recycling management process, the plant will further expand its capacity to deal with a larger amount of battery recycling demand.