Nigeria Times

By Li Jie, People’s Daily

China recently pledged a new round of large-scale equipment upgrades and trade-in of consumer goods in an action plan released by the State Council.

The action plan specifies tasks in four sectors, namely equipment renewal, consumer goods trade-in, used goods recycling, and standard leveling-up.

Equipment upgrades enjoy enormous market potential. According to the statistics released by the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) of China, the amount of investment in equipment across crucial sectors, including the industrial and agriculture sectors, reached approximately 4.9 trillion yuan ($676.52 billion) in 2023. With the further advancement of high-quality development in China, the demand for equipment upgrades will get stronger, creating an enormous market worth more than 5 trillion yuan annually.

Take the industrial sector as an example. The total industrial added value in China, a major industrial country, hit 39.9 trillion yuan last year, accounting for 31.7 percent of its GDP.

“The ongoing development of new industrialization will lead to an increased demand for advanced equipment in the industrial sector, making the sector a key area for large-scale equipment upgrades,” said Yu Xiaohui, head of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology.

Some industrial enterprises in China are still using outdated and inefficient equipment that have served beyond their designed lifespan. As industries quicken their upgrade processes, such equipment needs to be replaced and upgraded.

In recent years, China’s new energy industry has experienced rapid development, with a large number of wind power and photovoltaic devices being employed. Some of these devices would be removed once they surpass their expected lifespan.

According to estimates, by the end of the 14th Five-Year Plan period (2021-2025), the total capacity of outdated wind farms that have served over 20 years in China will exceed 1.2 million kilowatts. Starting from 2030, photovoltaic modules will also enter a period of intensive scrapping. The capacity of waste PV modules to be recycled is expected to hit 17.8 million kilowatts in 2030.

Currently, the Chinese economy is showing signs of steady recovery and improvement, even in the face of insufficient effective demand and weak social expectations.

An official with the NDRC said that promoting large-scale equipment upgrades can not only boost consumption and investment but also increase advanced production capacity, improve productivity, promote energy conservation and carbon reduction, and reduce safety hazards. It benefits both enterprises and the people.

In Wuhan, central China’s Hubei province, China Railway Construction Corporation (CRCC) has built the largest service base for tunnel boring machines (TBM) in central China, with an annual production capacity of 60 units. Old models and outdated machines that have been retired or do not meet technological specifications and energy consumption standards can be upgraded there.

Recently, CRCC decided to expand the TBM service base so as to enlarge its capacity. “Before the end of the first quarter, our schedule has been fully occupied,” said Zhang Kunfeng, general manager of Wuhan heavy equipment company of China Railway 11th Bureau Group Corporation.

Equipment upgrades create business opportunities. “For enterprises, equipment upgrades can be achieved through either purchasing new machines or retrofitting existing ones,” said Zhang.

The cost of retrofitting is usually much lower than purchasing new equipment, he added. According to him, the cost of retrofitting a TBM is only 20 to 25 percent of what it would cost to buy a new one.

The action plan specifies also multiple tasks, including promoting remanufacturing and cascading use, refining energy consumption, emissions and technology standards, and improving technical standards of products.

“This will drive industrial enterprises to phase out outdated and inefficient equipment, encourage the extensive adoption of high-tech, high-efficiency, and high-reliability equipment, and enhance their capability in research and development, design and manufacturing, inspection and testing, thus promoting the high-end development of the manufacturing industry,” said Yu.

Green and low-carbon transformation remains an important task. Sun Ying, deputy director of the energy research institute of the China Academy of Macroeconomic Research, believes that accelerating equipment upgrades and promoting the continuous increase of advanced capacity and efficient products can drive energy conservation and carbon reduction from the source, which can help expand domestic demand and improve energy utilization efficiency in consumer products.

The action plan said China aims to increase its investment in equipment for industry, agriculture, construction, transportation, education, culture, tourism and medical care by at least 25 percent by 2027, compared with 2023.

According to the plan, energy efficiency of major energy-consuming equipment in key industries will essentially achieve energy conservation standards; the proportion of production capacity meeting Grade A level environmental performance will rise significantly; industrial enterprises above the designated size will see the digitalization rate of R&D tools exceeding 90 percent and the computer numerical control rate for key production procedures surpassing 75 percent.

By Jiang Feng, Wang Xinyue, People’s Daily

Located at the junction of the Belt and Road and the Yangtze River Economic Belt, Chongqing municipality is a key strategic fulcrum for the development of China’s western region.

The China (Chongqing) Pilot Free Trade Zone (hereafter referred to as “Chongqing FTZ”) was established in 2017. Despite occupying less than a thousandth of Chongqing’s total area, it has gathered over 190,000 enterprises, including more than a quarter of the municipality’s foreign trade companies, which contribute to about 70 percent of the municipality’s total foreign trade volume.

One of the key characteristics of the Chongqing FTZ is its focus on institutional innovation. It has issued the multimodal transport bill of lading developed by China International Freight Forwarders Association in an attempt to pilot a “single bill of lading” model for rail-sea intermodal transportation. Besides, it provides application scenarios on its cross-border financial blockchain service platform for financing and settlement along the New International Land-Sea Trade Corridor (ILSTC), facilitating enterprises’ freight settlement, trade settlement and financing with a total value of over $3.3 billion.

Since its inauguration, the Chongqing FTZ has worked to align its policies with high-standard international economic and trade rules, steadily advancing institutional opening-up.

With a long blast of whistle, a China-Europe freight train loaded with cars slowly pulled out from the Yuzui freight station of Chongqing. Launched by the Guoyuan Port to pilot the full-train-load multimodal cross-border logistics, the train exits China through the Horgos Port in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uyghur autonomous region. It has opened up an efficient and convenient international logistics channel for automakers in Chongqing and its surrounding areas.

The train leaves China in about five days from its departure, which is twice as fast as sea transportation, said Xu Hao, manager of the overseas business development division of Chinese automobile manufacturer Changan Auto, adding that this multimodal logistics model helps the enterprise expand the overseas market.

According to Xu, vehicle brands independently owned by Changan Auto shipped over 100,000 vehicles overseas in the first three months of this year, an increase of 80.1 percent year on year.

In the first quarter of 2024, Chongqing’s auto exports totaled 8.92 billion yuan, up 24.1 percent year on year. In particular, the exports of electric vehicles reached 14,000 units, with a year-on-year growth of 219.4 percent in terms of value.

After settling in the Xiyong Comprehensive Bonded Zone of the Chongqing FTZ, Hewlett-Packard Company experienced the convenience of shipping products through intercontinental railway.

China-Europe freight trains and freight trains of the ILSTC have cheaper fair than air transportation and higher efficiency than sea transportation, thus significantly lowering the logistics cost for enterprises.

Because of this, Hewlett-Packard Company has constantly expanded its production in Chongqing. It has manufactured 400 million computers in the municipality so far.

“Thanks to China-Europe freight trains and freight trains of the ILSTC, the Chongqing FTZ can provide solid logistics support for enterprises and introduce more products to the world, thus achieving a virtuous circle of development in which transportation corridors facilitate logistics, logistics promotes economy and trade, and economy and trade drives industrial development of industries,” said Wang Xin, director of the Chongqing FTZ institutional innovation department of the Chongqing Municipal Commission of Commerce.

With two laptops being manufactured per second, Chongqing contributes to almost one-third of the world’s laptop production, becoming a key global hub for laptop manufacturing in just a few years. This giant leap couldn’t have been made without the improvement of government services in the Chongqing FTZ.

“Nearly 1,000 material codes need to be documented for a single laptop computer, a task that previously demanded customs officers to manually review and file each one separately, leading to a huge workload,” said Cao Huawu, deputy head of the Xiyong Customs, a subsidiary of Chongqing Customs.

“We provide proactive services that allow enterprises to file independently, set their own write-off periods, and engage in self-declaration and self-tax payment, which improves the whole procedure to the greatest extent,” Cao added.

Tech Front (Chongqing) Computer Co., Ltd. is one of the beneficiaries. “Now with just a click of the mouse, we can file on our own,” said Liu Hongliang, the company’s manager. According to him, the company has increased its efficiency in importing and exporting goods by approximately 20 percent.

Over the past few years, the Chongqing FTZ has been developing an open industrial system to gather modern factors in recent years, including intelligent manufacturing equipment, new energy and intelligent connected vehicles, cloud computing, big data, consumer finance, international exhibitions, and cross-border e-commerce, supporting Chongqing in its endeavor to build a hub for inland opening-up.

By Zhong Sheng, People’s Daily

For no good reasons, the United States recently launched a Section 301 investigation into China’s maritime, logistics and shipbuilding sectors, and groundlessly accused China of the so-called “unfair practices,” threatening to impose new restrictions including raising the tariff rates for both steel imports and aluminum imports from China.

Such unilateral and protectionist practice not only hurts the economic and trade relations between China and the United States, but also undermines global economic stability and development.

The petition for the Section 301 investigation initiated by the United States into China’s maritime, logistics, and shipbuilding sectors is filled with unfounded accusations. It misinterprets normal trade and investment activities as damaging to U.S. national security and corporate interests, and wrongly attributes America’s own industry issues to China. This not only lacks factual basis but also goes against economic common sense.

The petition describes the so-called “unfair trade practices” of China as the “biggest obstacle” to the recovery of the American shipbuilding industry. However, as the United States itself has stated, only 1 percent of the world’s commercial vessels are produced in the United States today, and its ranking has dropped from the first place in 1975 to 19th place today.

Multiple researches have shown that the U.S. shipbuilding industry has lost its competitive edge years ago due to overprotection.

According to the Financial Times, the shrinkage in the U.S. shipbuilding industry is a result of several factors, including a hollowing out of shipyards and construction capacity, a decrease in the number of marine engineers and architects, and an overall decline in competitiveness.

The United States accuses China of adopting so-called “non-market” practices while providing discriminatory subsidies worth hundreds of billions of dollars to its own industries. This accusation is baseless. In fact, the development of Chinese industries is a result of enterprises’ efforts to advance technological innovation and actively join market competition.

Take the shipbuilding industry as an example. Chinese shipbuilding companies have strengthened technological innovation, accelerated high-end, intelligent, and green development, actively participated in market competition, and honed their skills in the global market. The development of China’s shipbuilding industry is a natural outcome of international industrial development and China’s comparative advantages.

It’s not the first time for the United States to shift its domestic problems overseas in an attempt to find a cure. The last U.S. administration initiated a Section 301 investigation against China and raised tariffs, which was ruled by the WTO as a violation of its rules.

The terms of the Section 301 are typical examples of unilateralism, and the United States, driven by domestic political needs, has launched a new Section 301 investigation, openly calling for arbitrary adjustments to tariffs on Chinese products, which is a repeated mistake.

Under the excuse of so-called “national security,” the United States politicizes economic and trade issues, formulates discriminatory industrial policies, and sets numerous trade barriers, which will only harm others without benefiting itself.

The shipping industry bears over 80 percent of the global trade transportation and is crucial for global trade and economic growth. The United States’ trade bullying practices not only fail to address its own deep-rooted problems, but also disrupt global industrial and supply chains, hindering the healthy development of the world economy.

In recent years, the United States has implemented a number of measures to suppress China’s economic, trade, and technological advancements. The list of sanctions against Chinese companies keeps growing, which is not about “de-risking” but rather about creating risks.

History has repeatedly proven that for China and the United States, one country’s success is an opportunity for the other. Faced with new and evolving situation in China-U.S. business ties, the two sides should stay committed to mutual respect, mutual benefit and equal-footed consultation, follow economic and market rules, expand and deepen mutually beneficial business cooperation, respect each other’s development rights, and work for win-win outcomes for the two countries and the world at large.

China is willing to develop its relationship with the United States based on the principles of mutual respect, peaceful coexistence, and win-win cooperation. At the same time, China will continue to firmly safeguard its national sovereignty, security, and development interests.

The U.S. side should face its own problems, stop abusing unilateral trade measures, immediately cancel the additional tariffs imposed on China, and return to the rules-based multilateral trading system as soon as possible.

(Zhong Sheng is a pen name often used by People’s Daily to express its views on foreign policy and international affairs.)

By Wu Yuehui, People’s Daily

The first complete high-definition lunar geologic atlas in the world was released in Beijing on April 21. The atlas was drawn by a Chinese scientific research team mainly based on scientific exploration data from the Chang’e Project. With a scale of 1:2.5 million, it is the world’s most precise geological atlas of the whole moon.

This geologic atlas set, available in both Chinese and English, includes the Geologic Atlas of the Lunar Globe and the Map Quadrangles of the Geologic Atlas of the Moon. In particular, the Geologic Atlas of the Lunar Globe consists of the Geologic Map of the Moon, the Lithologic Map of the Moon and the Tectonic Map of the Moon. The Map Quadrangles of the Geologic Atlas of the Moon includes 30 standardized sub-schematic geological maps of the moon.

The world has been using the lunar geologic maps obtained by the Apollo program, but these maps can no longer meet the current and future needs of deep space exploration and scientific research.

Since 2012, academician Ouyang Ziyuan and researcher Liu Jianzhong of the Institute of Geochemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), have led a team of scientists and cartographers from relevant research institutions in compiling a new-generation lunar geologic atlas set, including Jilin University, Shandong University, China University of Geosciences (Beijing), the Institute of Geology of Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences, and the CAS Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research.

With a comprehensive and systematic understanding of the origin and evolution of the moon, the team compiled the atlas based on scientific exploration data gained from China’s Chang’e lunar exploration program and other research results from both Chinese and international missions, Liu said.

By studying and collecting elements such as lunar rock formation, geological structure, and characteristics of the moon in different ages, China made technical specifications and standards of lunar geologic mapping with independent intellectual property rights, and compiled the 1:2.5 million digital lunar geologic atlas set.

A total of 12,341 impact craters, 81 impact basins, 17 types of lithologies and 14 types of structures all over the moon are mapped in the atlas.

A unified classification system for the sub-types of basin formations has been established. Besides, some special elements including landing sites of human probes and points of special elevation are also shown in the atlas.

The atlas set has been integrated into the digital lunar cloud platform built by Chinese scientists, and will serve lunar scientific research and science education, as well as landing site selection, lunar resource exploration and path planning for China’s future lunar exploration projects.

By You Yi, People’s Daily

Can plants grow without soil and sunshine? The answer might be found in a “plant factory” at the Chengdu National Agricultural Science and Technology Center in Chengdu, southwest China’s Sichuan province.

In the plant factory, lettuce plants grow on multi-tier steel racks, bathing the red and blue rays emitted from LED lights fitted at the top of the racks. The factory, with a pinkish glow coming out of its glass walls, exactly resembles a scene in a sci-fi movie.

“Vegetable growing has its ‘production line,’ too. A head of lettuce can mature in just 35 days after the seed is sown if it’s provided with proper nutrients, lighting and temperature. It would take at least twice as long in an open field,” said Yang Qichang, head of the plant factory, pointing to the 20-tier facility.

As the chief scientist of the Institute of Urban Agriculture, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Yang and his team have been dedicated to the plant factory for nearly 20 years.

The plant factory runs this way. A computer commands robotic arms to plant lettuce seedlings onto plates, and then the plates are sent to designated tiers of the racks, where the seedlings receive lighting and nutrient solutions. When the lettuce plants mature, they are withdrawn from the racks and packed after their roots are cut off. Thanks to intelligent management and assistive robots, the plant factory is completely unattended, from seeding to harvesting, and to packing.

Traditional agriculture often faces reduced yields due to meteorological disasters, pests and plant diseases. It’s always difficult to maintain a sound environment for crops. Greenhouse cultivation is an exploration that allows for the cultivation of off-season vegetables, but it is still susceptible to adverse weather conditions such as high temperatures and snow.

Plant factories have shattered the constraints of natural conditions. As an efficient agricultural system that achieves year-round continuous crop production through precise control in a closed environment, a plant factory can adjust environmental factors such as light, temperature, humidity, and nutrients in real-time according to the specific requirements of different crops. This precise supply enables high-efficiency production.

Additionally, plant factories can induce flowering and promote rapid growth, significantly shortening crops’ growth cycle.

Plant factories feature accelerated growth of crops, said Wang Sen, a researcher with the Institute of Urban Agriculture. This type of facility, which is free from the limitations by land, space, and climate conditions, accelerates the growth of crops through a light-nutrient coupling technique. It can shorten the growth period of crops such as rice, wheat, corn, soybeans, cotton, and rapeseed by more than half, providing effective support for accelerating crop breeding.

It’s important to improve lighting efficiency and lower energy consumption when building a plant factory. Wang told People’s Daily that his team has established a database containing 1,238 “lighting solutions” for 72 crop varieties in five major categories, which helps adjust lighting plans based on crop varieties and stages of growth.

Besides, with the application of the light-temperature coupling technology, the plant factory’s overall energy consumption has been lowered by over 56 percent.

To address the issues of low land utilization and spatial efficiency in traditional flat planting, the team adopted vertical cultivation techniques. “This 20-tier vertical farm can increase land utilization by over 120 times,” Yang disclosed.

Today, the 200-square meter plant factory produces over 60 tons of vegetables each year. By adopting self-developed new crop varieties, vertical cultivation systems, automatic nutrient solution supply systems, energy-saving artificial light sources, and AI-based intelligent management systems, the vertical farm has achieved year-round stable food production.

The team is currently exploring profitable business models for the plant factory. It is learned that the high-end leafy vegetables grown in the plant factory target densely populated urban areas such as the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region and the Yangtze River Delta, as well as regions with a local vegetable self-sufficiency rate below 10 percent. Furthermore, the plant factory can also be used for intensive seedling cultivation, which not only reduces production costs but also ensures seedling quality.

China’s plant factories are going international. During an international plant factory technology training program hosted by China, students from over 20 countries received systematic training on plant factories. LED “lighting solutions” have been promoted in more than 100 countries and regions. China has also reached agreements with the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, Chile and Qatar to build vertical plant factories.

By Li Zenghui, Jiang Feng, Chang Biluo, People’s Daily

In the office building of the Chongqing Ecology and Environment Bureau, a water monitoring and control system flashed red, signaling excessive phosphorus concentration at a river section.

By tracing data from the sensors network, the system narrowed down the investigation area and pinpointed several upstream industrial enterprises as potential sources of contamination.

Inspection teams from local environmental protection agencies and other relevant departments were immediately dispatched to the identified sites. After their intervention, water quality returned to the normal level.

This rapid response was made possible by Chongqing’s efforts to advance digitalization.

The water monitoring and control system integrates data from over 10 municipal departments in agriculture, water resources, housing and urban-rural development sectors, as well as districts and counties in Chongqing.

The system’s sensing network has expanded from the original 1,112 sensors to over 15,000, allowing issues to be detected within 24 hours on average, down from 7 days previously.

In April 2023, Chongqing initiated a comprehensive digital transformation program known as “Digital Chongqing.” This involved establishing an integrated intelligent public data platform, a three-tier digital urban operation and governance center, six major application systems, and an intelligent governance framework.

The program aimed at infusing digital technologies and digital cognition into every aspect of city management and service delivery, restructuring operational systems, business processes and institutional mechanisms across various sectors, and modernizing social governance.

Recently, the digital urban operation and governance center in Chongqing’s Jiulongpo district received an alert: a dump truck with unsecured load was identified by video surveillance while crossing into another district’s jurisdiction in violation of regulations.

Through a location tracking system, the vehicle’s position and originating construction site were quickly pinpointed. With a single click, a task order was dispatched to relevant authorities. The detection to resolution of the entire illegal dump truck incident took less than 3 hours.

In advancing digitalization, Chongqing has worked to break down information barriers between government departments.

“Based on the data collected from government departments related to housing, urban management and transportation, we developed a dump truck monitoring system, which had been promoted city-wide to solve monitoring challenges,” said Zhang Jun, deputy director of Jiulongpo district’s big data application and development management bureau.

Chongqing also pursues targeted governance while promoting digitalization. For instance, the Xianglushan neighborhood of Chongqing High-tech Industrial Development Zone installed smart door sensors for elderly residents living alone and connected them to its governance command center. In Baochengsi community of Changzhou neighborhood, Rongchang district, an intelligent elderly care system is in place to serve senior citizens in need.

Over 1,000 townships and neighborhoods in Chongqing have established the integrated three-tier digital governance network, which seamlessly connects the township and neighborhood level, the village and community level, and finally down to individual grid unit areas.

Chongqing has made 65,000 digital grid-level holographic maps that facilitate end-to-end task allocation and case management. As a result, the resolution rate for issues reported at the grid level has reached 99.9 percent.

Digitalization has made public services more efficient. To better address public concerns, the Chongqing Municipal Public Security Bureau launched an online service platform. The platform offers over 430 online services, and 80 percent of them need no offline procedures at all. Since the platform was launched in January 2021, it has processed over 100 million service requests. Since April 2023, Chongqing rolled out 75 “one-stop” service packages citywide, covering high-frequency domains and key services closely related to production and daily lives of businesses and citizens, such as one-stop business registration and one-stop birth registration.

By Qiang Yuwen, People’s Daily

As one of the world’s largest power battery markets for eight consecutive years, China has established a power battery industrial system with the most extensive industrial and supply chains.

Large-scale production comes with the challenge of managing decommissioned power batteries. Recently, People’s Daily reporters tracked a batch of retired batteries in Wuhan and Jingmen, two cities in central China’s Hubei province, to see how these batteries are recycled and given a new lease on life.

A ride-sharing platform in Wuhan recently reached battery recycling specialists of GEM Co., Ltd. (GEM), a leading enterprise in China’s circular economy based in Shenzhen, to collect power batteries of several new energy vehicles (NEVs) whose capacity had degraded due to intensive usage.

The next day, the batteries were removed from vehicles and wrapped in insulating membranes by battery recycling specialists, and then shipped to GEM’s Wuhan facility.

At GEM’s facility, the batteries were sent to a workshop where their capacities were tested by automated equipment.

“Batteries with higher capacity will be repurposed in Wuhan, while those with severe capacity loss will be sent to our Jingmen facility for processing,” said Bie Chuanyu, deputy head of GEM Green Industry (Wuhan) Innovation Research Institute.

GEM recycles approximately a tenth of the decommissioned power batteries across China. Having previously focused on scrapping end-of-life vehicles, the company has forged strong partnerships with numerous automakers. Today, in response to the development of the NEV industry, the company has shifted its focus to recycle retired power batteries.

Apart from old power batteries, the recyclable materials also consist of waste materials that did not undergo cell assembly during battery production.

Not far from GEM’s Jingmen facility lies a factory of EVE Power, a battery manufacturer, where new lithium-ion batteries were rolling off the production line.

The factory was invested and built by EVE Energy Co., Ltd. based in Huizhou, south China’s Guangdong province, one of the leading manufacturers of lithium-ion batteries in China. It has grown into the largest power and energy storage battery production base in central China.

Driven by this industrial leader, nearly 100 companies have clustered together, forming an integrated power battery industrial chain.

It is reported that GEM has signed a strategic cooperation agreement with EVE Energy, exclusively recycling waste materials from the latter. It will process them into raw materials for battery production and return them to the battery factory. This recycling model is known as the “waste-for-raw-materials” approach.

Recycling is just the first step, and there’s much to do with repurposing retired power batteries.

In a power battery cascading utilization factory of GEM’s Wuhan facility, batteries with higher remaining capacity were sent to workstations and disassembled to modules and cells, which were then transported to production lines by automated guided vehicles. The cells would be recombined and made into household energy storage cabinets.

According to an employee of the factory, though some decommissioned power batteries are no longer capable of propelling vehicles, they can be repurposed for electric bikes, telecommunications base stations, energy storage cabinets, and solar-powered street lamps after undergoing disassembly and restructuring.

Near the GEM Wuhan facility’s parking lot, there are several energy storage cabinets for commercial and industrial use. “Each cabinet is composed of several dozen repurposed power battery packs and can generally be used for 8 to 10 years,” Bie said.

Even batteries with severely degraded capacity can be recycled by recovering valuable metals like lithium, cobalt, and nickel for future battery production. Every one percentage point increase in the lithium recovery rate can directly raise the recycling value of each ton of retired power batteries by thousands of yuan.

In addition to collaborating with third-party recycling and processing organizations, some automakers have also begun to establish their own battery recycling businesses.

In a workshop of an industrial park of Chinese automaker Dongfeng Motor Corporation in Wuhan, electric forklifts powered by recycled batteries were zipping around.

“These cascading utilization batteries are lighter, more powerful, and have longer range compared to traditional lead-acid batteries. A single charge allows for 8 hours of operation,” an employee said.

According to an executive of Dongfeng Hongtai Holdings Group Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of Dongfeng Motor Corporation, automakers have more precise information about battery conditions than third-party recyclers.

“With the retirement of large volumes of power batteries retire, the costs of developing and using cascading utilization products are expected to decrease significantly,” the executive noted.

According to China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the country has built over 10,000 service outlets for power battery recycling. Last year, 225,000 tons of decommissioned NEV power batteries were recycled.

A research institution predicted that the number of China’s retired power batteries will reach 820,000 tons by 2025. According to a plan for the green development of China’s industrial sectors during the 14th Five-Year Plan period (2021-2025), China will establish a relatively comprehensive power battery recycling and utilization system by 2025. This means a growing number of retired power batteries will be directed towards recycling and reutilization in the country.