The people take food as the sky, and food is the first thing. Food safety is inseparable from standardized production and processing, and it is inseparable from the protection of water sources and soil at the source. On April 20, the Central Plains Food Laboratory Scientists' Conference was held in Luohe City, Henan Province. The "Academic Group" composed of 4 academicians of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and more than 70 experts and scholars exchanged views on food safety and environmental health.
In view of the contradiction between industrial development and resources and environmental carrying capacity faced by the new energy and energy storage industry in the process of explosive growth, as well as the resulting environmental protection and occupational health issues, this scientist conference specially invited Zhong Faping, director and chief scientist of the National Engineering Research Center for Advanced Energy Storage Materials, to make a keynote report.
Challenges: Under ESG rules, the energy storage industry faces seven major issues
In recent years, governments around the world have formulated and promoted ESG-related legislation and policies based on their own national conditions. These policies are closely related to climate change, environmental protection, and energy transition, reflecting the international community's awareness of the importance of ESG and its concern for sustainable development.
On the same day, Zhong Faping pointed out in the report "Challenges and Countermeasures for the Sustainable Development of the Energy Storage Industry under ESG Rules" that driven by the energy security strategy and the "3060" dual carbon goal, the mainland's energy storage industry has ushered in a historic opportunity to build an international advantageous industrial cluster and industrial green ecological model project, which is expected to form an independent track of the trillion-level market, but also brings energy consumption, environmental pollution and carbon emission pressure.
Under ESG rules, the energy storage industry faces seven core issues, including energy consumption and carbon emissions, supplier management and material procurement, recycled material use and waste recycling, technological innovation and development, pollutant and waste emissions, labor safety and health, and product safety. Especially in the mining and smelting of raw materials for energy storage batteries (mainly lithium batteries), cell manufacturing and recycling of retired batteries, there are problems of high pollution, high energy consumption and high carbon emissions, among which resource acquisition and retired battery recycling are the most prominent.
Taking retired battery recycling as an example, because the positive and negative electrodes of the battery contain a variety of heavy metals and inorganic and organic compounds, the lithium hexafluorophosphate in the electrolyte is easy to hydrolyze in the air environment to produce harmful substances such as phosphorus pentafluoride and hydrogen fluoride, which will cause harm to human health and pollution to the air, soil, groundwater and ecosystems if they cannot be effectively recycled. At the same time, there is still a "small, scattered and chaotic" situation in the mainland waste lithium battery recycling industry, and many "small workshop" enterprises have seriously affected the order of the waste lithium battery recycling market at the cost of environmental pollution, safety hazards and damage to occupational health.
On the technical side, traditional recycling processes still do not address the issues of efficiency, emissions and costs. On the resource side, the mainland's nickel, cobalt, lithium and other strategic mineral resources are highly dependent on foreign countries, and safe and efficient recycling of retired batteries is an effective way to improve resource security capabilities, and it is an urban mine with great potential. In this regard, Xu Zhenghe, a foreign academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and dean of the School of Engineering of Southern University of Science and Technology, said that in order to ensure the safety of resources and avoid environmental pollution, battery recycling is imperative. To this end, he and his team independently innovated the controllable flash shredding technology. This technology uses the residual energy of waste batteries to crush batteries efficiently to achieve "green regeneration", which has the characteristics of safety and reliability, energy saving and environmental protection, simple process and easy industrialization.
In the international market, global attention to the environmental impact of the whole life cycle of energy storage batteries is also increasing. The EU's New Battery Regulation puts forward stricter requirements for the production and recycling of batteries, forming a green barrier. Under the new international rules, if mainland energy storage companies fail to form effective countermeasures in a timely manner, it may lead to insufficient supply of renewable raw materials, unable to meet the minimum carbon footprint requirements stipulated by regulations, and restrict mainland enterprises from participating in international competition in the energy storage industry.
At the same time, under the dual pull of new energy vehicles and energy storage market, the scale of the lithium battery market will continue to expand, the demand for raw materials will continue to increase, and the "retirement tide" of batteries is also coming. Therefore, the pressure on the mainland's resource acquisition and retired battery recycling will continue to increase, and it is urgent to improve the total factor productivity of the industrial chain through green and low-carbon transformation, ensure the supply of resources, and improve environmental friendliness.
Countermeasures: Think globally and collaboratively to break the situation and develop green productivity
The answer given by Deputy He Hong, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, is that technological innovation and industrial upgrading should focus on the whole chain, consider the upstream and downstream, front and back ends of the industrial chain and innovation chain as a whole, focus on the weak links and quickly tackle key problems, further promote technological convergence and industrial coordination, and eliminate the effect of shortcomings.
In the same end, Zhong Faping proposed that it is difficult to get through the multiple issues faced in the development of the energy storage industry by a single individual, a single link and a single policy. Only by thinking from the perspective of industrial development, driven by scientific and technological innovation, model innovation, and system innovation, we can build a green and low-carbon circular ecosystem with a closed-loop whole chain from "natural mines-battery materials-power and energy storage batteries-battery recycling", and develop green productivity, so as to solve the contradiction between the rapid development of the energy storage industry, environmental protection and occupational health, and promote the high-quality development of the industry.
To this end, he actively promotes the establishment of regional industrial alliances, industrial clusters, innovation consortia and green ecological industry funds to create an environmentally friendly, healthy and green energy storage industry ecosystem. Relying on the two national scientific research platforms of the National Engineering Research Center for Advanced Energy Storage Materials and the National Quality Supervision and Testing Center for Light Industry Batteries and Energy Storage Materials, Zhong Faping has successfully established an energy storage industry innovation consortium composed of 15 units, including Central South University, National Nanoscience Center, Jinchuan Group, Wuhan University, and China Innovation Airlines, to carry out energy storage industry standard formulation, quality supervision and testing evaluation, common technology research and sharing, and carry out strategic, cutting-edge, Disruptive green technology innovation, develop green and low-carbon industries and supply chains, and enhance the voice of mainland energy storage in the global high-end supply chain division of labor.
Practice: Multidisciplinary cross-innovation to create new quality productivity of energy storage
Green development is the background color of high-quality development, and new quality productivity itself is green productivity. Zhong Faping promotes the transformation of the structure, function and efficiency of productivity through scientific and technological innovation, accelerates the green and low-carbon transformation of development mode, and continues to stimulate new momentum for the development of new quality productivity with new achievements in green development.
In view of the problems of high pollution, high energy consumption and high carbon emissions in the energy storage industry in the process of metal resource extraction and recycling of waste lithium battery resources, he led the R&D team of the National Engineering Center for Advanced Energy Storage Materials, integrated physics, chemistry, metallurgy, materials science, etc., carried out multidisciplinary innovation, and creatively developed high-efficiency green extraction technology based on green smelting and polymetal co-generation, which is expected to realize the harmlessness, reduction and resource utilization of the three wastes, and increase the lithium yield from 65% to 85% It ensures that the production process is green, energy-saving and efficient. In the field of retired battery recycling, the team has also developed a "one-step" waste lithium-ion battery recycling process, based on the analysis of the material composition characteristics of the battery, creatively simplifying the process flow, mildly recovering the reaction conditions, and high-yield high-value substances, with a lithium recovery rate of more than 95%, a reduction of more than 60% in acid and alkali consumption, a reduction in wastewater discharge of more than 50%, and a reduction of more than 30% in the whole process cost from waste batteries to finished battery materials.
Through continuous innovation, Zhong Faping and his team actively build a circular ecosystem from natural mines to urban mines through the development of environment-friendly and resource-saving new quality productivity, break through the bottleneck of upstream resource dependence of the battery industry, promote the development of circular economy and green industry, jointly defend the blue sky, clear water and pure land, and help the low-carbon and high-quality development of the energy storage industry.
![16 ICBMs burst out of the water, launched in just 4 minutes, and the West: It's like the end of the world[fig]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAP///wAAACwAAAAAAQABAAACAkQBADs=)