On October 12th it said that in December a quota of 350,000-a-year would be imposed on hybrid EV imports from China. The European Union worries about China’s vast exports of cheap electric vehicles. This is expected to halve their market share. But the bloc also frets about China’s dominance over the supply of critical minerals used to make these vehicles.
China wants to use recycling to supply 510m tonnes of industrial materials annually by 2030, about one-third more than the current level. By 2030 China expects to generate 0.5m tonnes of waste from wind turbines, 1m tonnes from EV batteries and 1.5-2m tonnes from solar panels every year—big shares of the global total. Such arrangements have helped China build 85% of global battery-recycling capacity. In 2024 it set up a new state-owned company called China Resources Recycling Group to co-ordinate and streamline recycling efforts, with a focus on cleantech products. In 2024 it eased curbs on imports of some scrap copper and aluminium. In January it slashed import tariffs on the stuff from 6.5% to 3%.
Factories can tweak designs so that products are easier to dismantle later. Over the past five years most cities have rolled out mandatory sorting of household rubbish. That judgment rests on two considerations. First, China wants to dominate high-tech manufacturing in everything from robotics to wind turbines. And second, to achieve this, it must secure supplies of raw materials, connect more power lines and build more data-centres. Massive amounts of aluminium, copper, battery metals and rare earths are needed. it relies on imports for most of the ores While China controls the bulk of the global refining capacity for these materials. Meanwhile many Western countries want to reduce reliance on China’s factories. Officials worry they might try to squeeze its supplies. The easier part will be scaling up the recycling of steel, copper and aluminium: this kind of work is already a mature industry. Recycling more plastic is a little trickier, but worth it to help China reduce imports of oil. The hardest bit will be managing a growing tsunami of electronic garbage. That China already makes vast quantities of these goods should make recycling simpler to do. And many battery-producing techniques (such as using acids and heat to isolate valuable metals) are also used in recycling them. Take CATL, for example, the world’s largest battery-maker. Most of the Chinese firm’s sales are domestic, and will end up being processed by a CATL subsidiary called Brunp, which is the world’s biggest battery-recycler. As ever, China hopes its tech-enabled state can solve such problems. Recycling plants have started using artificial intelligence to sort more efficiently. In April battery and EV makers were required to give their products digital IDs to track them through their life cycle on a state-run platform. They have also been made legally responsible for recycling the batteries they make. And to make sure its recycling plants are fed, China is also quietly reassuming its old role in the waste trade. It is selectively rolling back import restrictions on some foreign waste.
In 2013, cautious of mounting public anger, China declared a “war on pollution” and released its first comprehensive national plan to create a circular economy. Electronics were directed to new “urban mining” zones to be scrapped safely; household rubbish was sent to specialised plants to be burned for power; the proportion of waste dumped in landfills started to fall. In 2017 China launched “Operation National Sword” to stop most imports of plastics (in 2021 all imports of solid waste were banned). China was “no longer a dumping ground,” trumpeted state-run media. Last year a researcher at a state-owned research facility said that without recycling China would “keep facing strangleholds in the future”. Officials have pledged to continue to increase imports of “high-quality” recycled materials over the next five years.
Last year it started allowing imports of black mass.
A fast-growing number of EVs will soon be scrapped and replaced. From next month the EU will make it harder to export this waste. The aim is to encourage more processing of black mass close to home (at the moment most is shipped to Asia). In August America, which has banned Chinese EVs but still imports lots of Chinese batteries, blocked all black-mass exports.
Shredding their batteries yields “black mass”, a powder from which valuable metals such as lithium, cobalt and nickel can be recovered and reused.
