[Lithium Battery: CATL's 350Wh/kg Aviation Battery Passes Adjacent Cell Thermal Runoff Validation]

According to Roll Call and other U.S. congressional media outlets on August 10, President Trump held a roundtable meeting with about 200 mining industry officials at the State Department in Washington, D.C., on August 7 local time to discuss ways to strengthen the U.S. critical minerals supply chain. During the meeting, Secretary Lutnick directly mentioned Korea Zinc’s USD 7.4 billion U.S. critical minerals smelter project as a key example of supply chain investment by the U.S. government, emphasizing the need for cooperation with allied countries.

[Sinomine Resource Group: Subsidiary’s Two High-Purity Lithium Chemicals Production Lines Resume Production] On August 10, Sinomine Resource Group announced that its wholly-owned subsidiary Jiangxi Sinomine Lithium Industry, due to a mismatch between lithium concentrates transportation and production scheduling, temporarily shut down the "Annual 30,000 mt High-Purity Lithium Chemicals" and "Annual 35,000 mt High-Purity Lithium Chemicals" production lines for maintenance starting from June 30, 2026. With the maintenance now completed, the company has decided to resume production at the "Annual 30,000 mt High-Purity Lithium Chemicals" line on August 10, 2026, and plans to gradually resume production at the "Annual 35,000 mt High-Purity Lithium Chemicals" line in mid-August 2026.

[Black Mass Imports: Policy Channel Open, Yet Market Circulation Still Faces Multiple Bottlenecks] On June 1, 2025, a joint announcement by the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and the General Administration of Customs officially took effect, removing compliant waste lithium-ion battery powder from the Catalogue of Solid Wastes Forbidden from Import and subjecting it to import management as ordinary goods. This marked a long-awaited policy breakthrough for China’s lithium battery recycling industry—prior to this, the channel for raw materials from outside China had never been legally accessible, and the industry relied almost entirely on domestically retired power batteries and off-cuts from battery factories.