Authorities in China are being urged to shut down “substandard” secondary lead production facilities as part of moves to boost the recycling of lead-acid batteries.
China’s lead consumption largely depends on the use of secondary lead, the chairman of the China Industrial Alliance of Renewable Energy, Li Shilong, told the Shanghai Metals Market Lead Zinc Summit in Guangxi Province.
However, Li said only four million metric tonnes (MT) of lead-acid battery scrap was processed in China in 2017— despite there being a combined processing capacity of some 10m MT across a total of 88 secondary lead producing firms.
Li blamed the low processing figure on “some producers failing to comply with China’s environmental regulations”.
Li told the summit China should consider “further standardising its secondary lead industry, by optimising the existing capacity and eliminating substandard ones”.
As of 2013, more than four million MT of refined lead went into batteries in China and 1.5 MT of scrap lead recycled from these batteries was reused in other secondary materials, according to a 2015 paper published by researchers at Beijing University of Technology’s Institute of Circular Economy.
The paper said used lead batteries could have generated 2.4 MT of scrap lead in 2014— “much higher than the 1.5 MT that was recycled in 2013”. “The current recycling rate is too low. It is suggested that while building large-scale recycling plants, small-scale plants should be banned or merged.”