GEM and Ruipu Energy have formed a strategic partnership to jointly establish an entire battery industry chain in order to realise the safe recycling, storage and green disposal of lithium-ion batteries, Kallanish reports.

Founded in 2017, Ruipu Energy is backed by Tsingshan Industry. Ruipu Energy is mainly engaged in the R&D, production, and sales of the cell-to-system applications of power or energy storage lithium-ion batteries for NEV power and smart electricity storage systems.

GEM (Green Eco-Manufacture) is a Shenzhen listing company focused on battery recycling services. At present, the two mainstream techniques for lithium power battery recycling include dry metallurgy and hydrometallurgy. GEM currently adopts the latter technique and has realised the large-scale recycling of consumer-grade lithium batteries to extract metals such as cobalt and nickel.

The cooperation within the power battery recycling industry chain is inevitable as both the volumes and levels of complexity of batteries increase.

Starting from this year, GEM has signed strategic agreement with various industry leaders, including EVE Energy and Farasis Energy. Prior to this, GEM signed power battery recycling agreements and cooperated with more than 200 automakers and battery factories around the world.

The total market for power battery recycling from 2020 to 2030 in Chia is expected to exceed CNY 200 billion ($31.32 billion), of which the ternary battery recycling takes about CNY 130.5 billion, and the lithium iron phosphate battery recycling takes about CNY 68 billion.

Public data shows that in the first half of the year, GEM's power battery recycling business grew rapidly, achieving operating income of nearly CNY 55 million, a year-on-year increase of 75.90%, of which the company's cascade battery pack shipments exceeded 11,600 sets, a y-o-y increase of 325%.

GEM has started the construction of power battery recycling bases in both Shenzhen and Tianjin this year. So far, its facilities cover several major Chinese cities, including Shenzhen, Tianjin, Wuxi, Jingmen and Wuhan.

GEM plans to raise its power battery recycling scale to 250,000 tonnes/year by 2025, and intends to cooperate with global upstream and downstream partners to build power battery recycling bases in Indonesia and Europe. It expects the production and sales scale of ternary precursors to be exceeding 400,000 t/y, and the production capacity of cobalt tetroxide to be exceeding 35,000 t/y.