On September 15, the Department of Science and Technology of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) released the "Guidelines for the Construction of the Standard System for the Power Battery Recycling and Utilization Industry (2026 Edition)" for public comment. The document is short, but its goals are ambitious: by 2030, more than 50 national standards will be formulated and revised, basically building a power battery recycling and utilization standard system that covers the entire industrial chain and the full life cycle of products. The public comment period ends on October 15.
This document is not exactly early. China's NEV (New Energy Vehicle) production and sales have ranked first globally for many consecutive years, and the first batch of power batteries installed in large-scale vehicles is entering the retirement window. After seven or eight years of development in the recycling industry, standards are only now beginning to systematically catch up. The question is, why now, and whether 50 national standards can handle the retirement wave that has already arrived at the doorstep.
The Retirement Wave Is Arriving Faster Than Expected
The industrial chain of power battery recycling can be summarized into three key processes: collection, processing, and utilization. The draft for comments divides the standard system into six modules: basic and general, collection and classification, physical processing, chemical processing, comprehensive utilization products, and green and low-carbon, almost covering this chain from beginning to end. The pressure at the data level is tangible.
According to data from the China Automotive Power Battery Innovation Alliance, the cumulative installed capacity of power batteries in China exceeded 1200 GWh in 2025. The first batch of models with large-scale battery installations were pure electric platform models mass-produced around 2018. The design life of the battery is generally 8 years or 150,000 kilometers. This means that starting from 2025, the scale of retired batteries will increase year by year.
However, the current state of the recycling industry does not match this scale. Formal recycling enterprises and small workshops coexist, and the technical routes for cascade utilization and regenerative utilization have not yet been unified. Safety standards for cross-regional transportation, traceability management of retired batteries, and purity requirements for recycled products have previously relied mostly on industry standards and corporate self-discipline, with a lack of mandatory national standards.
Why Are the Standards Being Built Only Now
Power battery recycling is not a new topic.
Around 2018, the MIIT published the first batch of enterprise lists that met the "Industry Specification Conditions for the Comprehensive Utilization of Waste Power Batteries for NEVs (New Energy Vehicles)", commonly known in the industry as the "white list". However, the white list solves the problem of "who can do it", but does not systematically solve the standard problem of "how to do it". There are several reasons for this.
In the early stages, the installed capacity was small, the scale of retired batteries was limited, and industry contradictions were not prominent. Recycling enterprises explored their own process routes; physical dismantling, hydrometallurgy, and cascade utilization each had their own practices. The technical routes themselves were still iterating, and setting standards too early would instead constrain innovation.
More importantly, the recycling industrial chain involves multiple entities, including automakers, battery manufacturers, dealers, maintenance outlets, recycling enterprises, and smelting enterprises, making cross-departmental and cross-regional coordination difficult. The draft for comments includes the entire chain of "collection—storage and transportation—physical processing—chemical processing" within the scope of standard coverage, indicating a shift in regulatory thinking from "managing enterprises" to "managing the chain".
The addition of the green and low-carbon module is particularly noteworthy. The energy consumption, emissions, and secondary pollution of the recycling process itself must also be constrained by standards.
What does this mean for the industrial chain?
For automakers and battery manufacturers, once the standard system is formed, traceability management and Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) will be more effectively implemented. Every link—from which 4S dealership the retired battery flows out, through which storage point it passes, to which processing plant it enters—must have standards to follow.
For recycling enterprises, unified standards are both a threshold and a benefit. If small workshops fail to meet safety and environmental protection standards, their survival space will be compressed; formal enterprises on the white list, with national standard endorsement for their business scope and product quality, will find it easier to secure orders from automakers and battery manufacturers.
For consumers, the perception may not be strong in the short term. But in the long run, a standardized recycling system means that waste batteries will not flow into informal channels, and cascade utilization products, such as energy storage power stations and low-speed electric vehicle batteries, will have better safety guarantees.
Standards Are Not the Endpoint
Fifty national standards sound like a lot, but compared to the complexity of the full life cycle of power batteries, this number is not actually that large.
From the draft for comments to the official release, and then to the specific formulation and implementation of each standard, there is still a long way to go. The real test lies in execution. After the standard system is established, the supervision of cross-regional transportation, the clearance of small workshops, and the market access for cascade utilization products all require supporting law enforcement and policy implementation.
The retirement wave waits for no one; the speed of standard system construction determines how steadily China's power battery recycling industry can move forward. The standard system can manage safety, environmental protection, and quality, but it cannot manage innovation incentives and competitive order.
Automotive analyst Dong Yang reminds that intellectual property construction remains a shortcoming in China's power battery industry. Patent disputes between major domestic power battery manufacturers in recent years, as well as recent international patent disputes encountered by large domestic enterprises, have all attracted industry attention. International competition in advanced industries is more intense, and patents often become weapons in the game of the international market.
Meanwhile, China's intellectual property system is still under construction, and the ecosystem of respecting intellectual property is not yet perfect. In the past, when introducing advanced international technologies, the government attached importance to the construction of laws, regulations, and management systems. However, within the domestic industry, the legal dissemination of advanced technologies has not received enough attention, and the phenomenon of emphasizing "poaching talent" while neglecting the legal acquisition of technology is not uncommon.
If this problem cannot be properly resolved, it will be difficult to truly build an internationally leading industry. Enterprises must attach importance to patent layout; the larger the enterprise, the stronger the system must be.
Industry organizations, on the other hand, should guide enterprises to realize that intellectual property construction is as important as product development and quality management; support the rational flow of talent and oppose irrational flow; promote the construction of patent pools and third-party patent service institutions, and strengthen international exchanges. The ideal state is to make those who create knowledge profitable, those who reasonably apply knowledge thrive, and those who do not respect intellectual property struggle. The same logic applies to curbing excessive internal competition.
In the recycling industry, formal enterprises and small workshops coexist. Small workshops do not bear environmental and safety costs and rely on low prices to grab supply; raising the threshold through standards is the first gate to curb excessive internal competition, but compliant enterprises must not fall into a low-price melee either. Dong Yang reminds that curbing excessive internal competition cannot rely solely on the government; the industry itself must also have a basic consensus, stabilizing prices for both upstream and downstream.
Retired batteries are "urban mines". Only when the recycling chain achieves stable profitability can lithium, nickel, and cobalt stably return to the supply chain, and raw material prices will not fluctuate drastically. The retirement wave waits for no one; the speed of standard system construction determines how steadily China's power battery recycling industry can move forward. But standards are only the starting point; innovation incentives, industry self-discipline, and resource price stability equally determine how far this chain can go.