It is learned on March 24 from TMTPost that at the beginning of the year, CATL announced the first tens of billions of investment projects this year. This project is an integrated new material industry production base built in Foshan by Guangdong Bangpu Recycling Technology Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of CATL, with an investment scale of 23.8 billion yuan, including a recycling project of 500,000 tons of waste battery materials.

CATL is not the first company to make a big bet on the recycling of power batteries. Since last year, this track has been favored by leading companies and capital. Among them are Volkswagen, Guoxuan Hi-Tech, SK Innovation, NIO Capital, Alibaba and other leading enterprises and institutions.

According to incomplete statistics from TMTPost, there were more than 20 investment and financing events in the power battery recycling track in 2022, of which more than 10 cases have financing amounts as high as 100 million yuan. Judging from the financing operation cycle of half a year to one year, the actual attention time of capital should be earlier.

If we only look at the current situation, the recycling of power batteries is still some distance away from the real “explosion period” or the centralized scrapping period of power batteries. At present, the effective capacity of domestic dismantling and recycling is about 600,000 tons of used batteries per year, but the actual recycling of used lithium batteries is only 235,000 tons, which is nearly twice the difference.

But this does not prevent power battery recycling from becoming the darling of capital in advance. Many institutions predict that the scale effect of power battery recycling will begin to be released in 2025.