New National Standard for Power Banks Ensures Safety; Recycling Challenges Urgently Need Solutions

The first mandatory national standard in the power bank (portable charger) sector, the officially released “Safety Technical Specification for Power Banks” (GB 47372—2026), is set to take effect on April 1, 2027. This will draw a safety red line for the power bank industry. But after the release of the new national standard, a real-world exam question urgently needs attention: what should happen to the tens of millions of existing non-compliant power banks on the market? If they are handled improperly, they become safety and environmental hazards scattered across urban and rural areas. If standardized collection and reuse channels can be opened up, these “retired” products can become “urban mines,” injecting new momentum into the development of a circular economy.

Although the new national standard provides a 12-month transition period to give the market enough time to absorb existing stock, it also makes the disposal of non-compliant products a difficult problem. Today, a large number of non-standard power banks are facing multiple sources of disorderful flow: some are casually mixed into ordinary household waste by consumers, and during compression, landfilling, or incineration, fires may be triggered due to battery short circuits; others may cause persistent pollution of soil and water bodies due to electrolyte leakage and the permeation of heavy metals. Still others are picked up by scavengers and then flow to small workshops, where secondary pollution is generated through violent disassembly without protection……These disorderly practices not only greatly dilute the value of the new national standard in safety governance, but also impose unnecessary pressure on the ecological environment.

In fact, non-compliant power banks labeled as “eliminated products” are not worthless “electronic waste.” The core component—lithium batteries—contain metals such as cobalt, nickel, lithium, and copper, which have relatively high value for recycling and reuse.

It is worth noting that ensuring the safe “exit” of a large number of non-compliant power banks and achieving efficient “recycling” is absolutely not a task that can be completed by a single party. It requires coordinated efforts from the government, enterprises, and consumers to build a full-chain, closed-loop recycling and reuse system—so that “recycling” outperforms “discarding,” and “regeneration” replaces “waste.”

At the government level, institutional design and regulatory backstops are needed, so that standardized recycling can be followed according to rules and can be profitable. The government should quickly roll out a unified national power bank recycling classification standard; increase crackdowns on illegal disassembly small workshops to raise the cost of violations; draw on the mature experience of trade-in programs for home appliances, and explore introducing a fiscal subsidy mechanism for “trade in your old power bank for a new one.” At the same time, through tax incentives, fiscal support, and other measures, the government can help legitimate recycling companies improve their collection points and enhance their capabilities for professional disposal, enabling compliant recycling to develop sustainably.

At the enterprise level, they must proactively assume producer responsibility, integrating recycling and reuse into the entire industrial chain. Leading power bank brands should take the lead in implementing extended producer responsibility systems, and, together with professional third-party recycling organizations, establish dedicated recycling points both at offline stores and on online platforms. They should create a convenient mechanism of “trade-in for new + targeted recycling.” Lithium battery recycling companies, meanwhile, need to increase investment in technical research and development, optimize disassembly and leaching processes, improve the efficiency of resource recovery, and reduce processing costs. They should also strengthen in-depth cooperation with power bank manufacturers to form an industrial closed loop of “recycling—regeneration—manufacturing.”

At the consumer level, people need to establish awareness of green consumption and standardized recycling. When faced with power banks that are intended to be phased out, consumers should voluntarily dispose of them in accordance with local classification standards, or handle them through the brand’s official recycling channels. They must never discard them arbitrarily or mix them with ordinary household waste, so that “green purchasing and standardized recycling” becomes an automatic consumer practice.

A small power bank is both a miniature reflection of the consumer electronics sector and an embodiment of China’s manufacturing industry shifting toward greener, higher-quality development. The new national standard is not only an upgrade to safety standards for the industry, but also a forced push toward green industrial development. Only if the government, enterprises, and consumers move in the same direction—by tightening the grassroots recycling network and improving the closed-loop utilization system—can these non-standard products be transformed from “electronic waste” into “urban mines.” (China Economic Net reporter Yang Xiufeng)

(Editor: Zhang Xiaobo)

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