The increasing usage of electrical drive systems and stationary energy storage worldwide lead to a high demand of raw materials for the production of lithium-ion batteries. To prevent further shortage of these crucial materials, ecological and efficient recycling processes of lithium-ion batteries are needed. Nowadays industrial processes are mostly pyrometallurgical and as such energy and cost intensive. The LithoRec projects, funded by the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Building and Nuclear Safety (BMUB), aimed at a realization of a new energy-efficient recycling process, abstaining high temperatures and tracing mechanical process-steps. The conducted mechanical processes were thoroughly investigated by experiments in a laboratory and within technical scale, describing gas release of aged and non-aged lithium-ion batteries during dry crushing, intermediates, and products of the mechanical separation. Conclusively, we found that applying a second crushing step increases the yield of the coating materials, but also enables more selective separation. This work identifies the need for recycling of lithium-ion batteries and its challenges and hazard potential in regards to the applied materials. The outlined results show a safe and ecological recycling process with a material recycling rate of at least 75%.

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The use of lithium‐ion batteries ( LIB s) has grown since the market entry of portable power tools and consumer electronic devices. Soon, the need for LIB will rise, when they are used in hybrid and full electric vehicles as well as in energy storage systems to enable the use of renewable energies. To prevent a future shortage of cobalt, nickel, and lithium and to enable a sustainable life cycle of these technologies, new recycling processes for LIBs are needed. These new processes have to regain not only cobalt, nickel, copper, and aluminum from spent battery cells but also a significant share of lithium. Therefore, this article approaches unit operations and their combination to set up for efficient LIB recycling processes, especially considering the task to recover high rates of valuable materials with regard to involved safety issues. Further discussed unit operations are Deactivation/discharging of the battery Disassembly of battery systems (specifically for EV‐battery systems ) Mechanical processes (including inert crushing, sorting, and sieving processes and a special case: thermomechanical separation) Hydrometallurgical processes Pyrometallurgical processes Specific dangers are associated with LIB recycling processes: electrical dangers, chemical dangers, burning reactions, and potential interactions of the single dangers. Furthermore, industrial process chains, already in use, as well as research approaches are summarized. The processes of the companies Retriev Technologies , Recupyl , Batrec , Inmetco , Xstrata , Umicore , Accurec , AEA Technology , OnTo T echnology, and Lion Engineering are discussed and illustrated briefly. A closer look is given to some results of the research project LithoRec .