Выброшенные батареи будут циркулировать на более высоком уровне стоимости.

The scale of retired power batteries continues to expand, sparking a debate over the optimal recycling routes. The hydrometallurgical method is currently the most widely used: it involves crushing spent battery cells as a whole, followed by leaching and purification processes to extract valuable metals from the batteries. While this approach is technologically mature, its drawbacks are equally pronounced—prolonged processes, high reagent consumption, elevated energy costs, and the secondary pollution risks associated with waste liquid disposal. Additionally, the original high added value of battery materials is significantly diminished during the metallurgical process.

The electrode stripping and regeneration process offers a more cost-effective recycling pathway: through precise and meticulous disassembly of battery cells, intact and well-conditioned positive and negative electrodes are separated. Techniques such as mechanical stripping and thermal de-binding are employed to remove the active powder materials from the electrode surfaces. After screening, impurity removal, and modification treatments, high-purity regenerated cathode powder is obtained. This material does not require downgrading to the metal level for re-melting and can be directly blended with new cathode materials to prepare batteries, maximizing the preservation of the original value of battery materials while significantly reducing production processes, energy consumption, and carbon emissions. The core key to industrializing this process lies in leveraging automated continuous production lines for precise disassembly, efficient stripping, and fine powder refinement. By ensuring the performance of the regenerated powder meets standards and satisfies battery reuse requirements, the process strictly controls equipment investment and unit processing costs, enabling large-scale commercial implementation.

On this route, Hefei Hengli's entry is not a crossover but an extension of existing capabilities: the company has been deeply engaged in thermal engineering equipment for over three decades and lithium battery material equipment for two decades, with a leading market share in cathode material sintering equipment. Temperature uniformity and atmosphere field control are precisely the core metrics in the baking and sintering stages following lithium replenishment and recoating.

A more direct support lies in its battery recycling equipment system, which has covered the entire process of precision disassembly, crushing, pyrolysis sorting, and material restoration. This allows the restoration and disassembly production lines to be combined into a tiered structure—"first restoration, then disassembly"—where performance-restorable electrodes proceed through the restoration line, while the remaining materials enter the crushing and recycling stage, with both production lines sharing equipment and operational resources.

From the perspective of the recycling hierarchy, dismantling and recycling recover the value of metals, while repairing electrodes retains the value of materials. Each additional electrode repaired eliminates the energy consumption and emissions associated with re-melting. This reveals the optimal sequence for resource utilization—repair takes precedence, followed by dismantling as a fallback.

This hierarchical gap is also reshaping the evaluation standards for battery recycling: beyond processing scale, whether reuse can be achieved at the material level has become another criterion for measuring the effectiveness of recycling systems. As operational data from refurbishment production lines continues to accumulate, this pathway is expected to transition from a technical option to an industry default, marking the true closure of large-scale recycling for retired batteries.