Lead is classified to be one of the top heavy metal pollutants in China. The corresponding environmental issues especially during the management of spent lead-acid battery have already caused significant public awareness and concern. This research gives a brief overview on the recycling situation based on an investigation of the lead industry in Ch. ••The situation of secondary lead production in China is overviewed.••30–40% of spent lead-acid batteries are illegally processed.••30% of primary lead production may be cut by improving the management efficiency.Spent lead-acid batteryManagementRecyclingCirculabilityLead-acid battery (LAB) is a well-established battery system. It still holds a large share of the battery market nowadays and intensively used in automotive, power back-up systems and stationary applications (Ambrose et al., 2014, Li et al., 2014, Parker, 2001). The advantages of LABs are low resource and manufacturing cost, high operational safety, relatively portable implementation and relatively established recycling technology, comparing with other battery systems (Chang et al., 2009, Treptow, 2002). In China, LAB industry has extended into an industry with more than 400 plants to date (Zhao and Cao, 2015-11-24). The production of LABs increases steadily over the past 10 years as shown in Fig. 1 and in 2013 the production capacity reaches 205.23 × 106 kW h (Tian et al., 2015). These batteries are widely spread into different areas (urban and countryside of different local infrastructure implementation and public awareness) over the country. Eventually, the destiny of spent LABs is of great environmental concern, due to the high toxicity of lead. Although the traditional recycling technology of lead scrap through smelting is relatively mature, pollution from spent LABs still sometimes seriously happens. According to the 2015 report on lead-acid battery by Chinese Association of Battery Industry (Zhao and Cao, 2015-11-24), disposal of lead-containing acid increases significantly by year in the past 12 years and it only starts to decrease from recently (Fig. 1b). Lead is of highly toxic, poisoning almost every organ throug. China is the largest exporter and consumer of LABs, with averagely ∼3.03 million tons lead consumption annually (taking an average from the year of 2010–2012) (Zhang et al., 2016). It is estimated that the 2.46 million tons secondary lead is generated in the form of spent LABs in 2014. In order to facilitate recycling of such waste, two types of technologies, i.e. pyrometallurgy and hydrometallurgy, are applied, in association with pretreatment of spent LABs. Prior to metallurgical/chemical processing, the pretreatment is usually through breaking, crushing and physical separation. In this procedure, spent LABs are separated into a number of streams including lead-bearing scrap, sulfuric acid, polypropylene and plastic materials. In general, spent LAB contains 11–30 wt.% electrolyte, 24–30 wt.% lead grid, 30–40 wt.% paste lead, and the rest of plastics and organic materials (Boden, 1998, Li et al., 2011). Typical compositions of a spent lead-acid battery is shown in Table 1. It can be found that the constitutions of LABs vary significantly on the shell weight with different batteries while the lead grid and lead paste content are relatively stable. The content of different lead compounds, however, changes significantly especially for the battery paste, from PbO of new battery to PbO2/PbSO4 of spent battery. A general flowsheet of spent LABs processing is given in Fig. S1. The sulfuric acid is sent to acid plant for further purification while the remaining waste streams, such as the plastic materials, are usually landfilled. The spent.