China has always placed importance on self-sufficiency, and now the world’s largest consumer of industrial metals is digging mines into its own waste streams.

The largest producer of solar panels, batteries, and EVs, Chinese businesses are seeing in these valuable products equally valuable opportunities for recycling and revenue.

The China Resources Recycling Group, created by the State Council last year, is seeking to bring together businesses with the expertise and infrastructure to recycle offline e-waste in large quantities for its lithium, cobalt, copper, gold, aluminum, and nickel.

According to the national publication Economic Daily, the trade in recycled materials from wind and solar power and EV batteries has grown to an enormous sum of $38.5 billion per year, more than double of what the US market for solar recycling was predicted to be in 2050, and also more than the current market for recycling both solar panels and lithium-ion batteries.

Chinese manufacturers produce the greatest share of the world’s electric vehicles, and after a decade of growth, the first wave of battery retirements is crashing down on the Chinese economy. In just a few years, the retired battery tonnage is expected to reach 4 million.

Speaking with South China Morning Post, a pair of business owners said they are seeing big revenues in recycling coming from batteries and solar cells. One, Tianli Technology in Zhejiang Province, earns a quarter of all profits from just batteries, while the much larger Henan Hairui Intelligent Technology, has 70% of its productive capacity dedicated to making machines that recycle batteries and solar panels.

“There is huge potential in the business of new-energy waste, because new energy is where China and the world are going,” said Hairui sales manager Ma Long.

Beijing has so far enrolled 156 businesses to standardize the battery-recycling market’s practices for avoiding workplace accidents and environmental contamination.

Previous eras of industrial growth in China have led to disastrous instances of environmental contamination, something subsequent CCP efforts have strived to prevent. Lithium-ion batteries contain toxic metals and compounds that can leech into soils and waterways, so proper recycling is key. It’s also rewarding, as every gram of nickel and lithium safely extracted helps keep bottom lines high.

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Perhaps even more astonishing than the growth of the EV market in China was its expansion of solar panel production and installation. In one single desert solar array, 3 million panels are shimmering already under the Sun. This is an outgrowth of a ridiculously-large expansion of clean energy industry.

China became the first country to have over 100 GW of total installed photovoltaic capacity in 2017, and as of 2024, was home to 1 in every 3 panels installed worldwide as it added 277 GW of solar power in that one 12-month period, equivalent to 15% of the world’s total installed solar capacity.

Chinese firms are the industry leaders in almost all the key parts of the solar industry supply chain, including polysilicon, silicon wafers, batteries, and photovoltaic modules.

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The recycling chains for solar power are less developed than for batteries, in part because the environmental impact of batteries is higher than retired solar panels. But if the growth in producing panels, producing batteries, and recycling batteries is any indication, one would expect this deficiency to disappear rapidly as the country begins to retire its first generation of solar panels.