Volkswagen of America announced an agreement with Redwood Materials to recycle batteries from Volkswagen and Audi electric vehicles in the United States. Previously, Redwood had formed similar partnerships with Toyota, Ford and Volvo, and had recycling deals with Panasonic's Nevada plant, Amazon and others.
In recent years, Volkswagen has accelerated the layout of power batteries. On July 7, Volkswagen broke ground on its battery plant in Salzgitter, Germany. Meanwhile, Volkswagen unveiled plans to build six battery cell production plants in Europe by 2030, including a plant in Salzgitter and a plant in Skaleft, Sweden. A third plant will be established in Valencia, Spain, and a fourth in Eastern Europe. The company is also exploring plans to build a future gigafactory in North America. According to statistics, these plants will eventually have a production capacity of 240 gigawatt hours per year.
Volkswagen is poised for an electrified transition and has vowed to overtake Tesla as the world's top electric car maker.
In addition, due to factors such as the strong market demand for lithium chemical products and the high price at this stage, not only Volkswagen has extended its industrial chain to power battery recycling. Nissan plans to build new battery recycling plants in the U.S. and Europe by the end of fiscal 2025. And it hopes to reduce the cost of electric vehicle production by recycling batteries and reusing them for electric vehicles amid rising prices for rare metals.
In May of this year, BMW Group announced that it will join hands with Zhejiang Huayou Cycle Technology Co., Ltd. to create an innovative cooperation model for closed-loop recycling and cascade utilization of power battery materials in the field of new energy vehicles, and realize closed-loop recycling of domestic electric vehicle power battery raw materials for the first time.
On June 15, Audi and Nunam jointly built an electric tricycle, which is expected to be tested on the road in a pilot project in India in 2023. It is reported that this electric tricycle will use the same level of power batteries as electric vehicles as power supply. However, it uses old batteries recovered from Audi e-tron test vehicles.
On the whole, the power battery recycling industry has a wide coverage and a long industrial chain, ranging from battery manufacturers to end-use enterprises, involving many.
