Challenges to Future Development of Spent Lithium Ion Batteries Recovery from Environmental and Technological Perspectives

Abstract

Spent lithium ion battery (LIB) recovery is becoming quite urgent for environmental protection and social needs due to the rapid progress in LIB industries. However, recycling technologies cannot keep up with the exaltation of the LIB market. Technological improvement of processing spent batteries is necessary for industrial application. In this paper, spent LIB recovery processes are classified into three steps for discussion: gathering electrode materials, separating metal elements, and recycling separated metals. Detailed discussion and analysis are conducted in every step to provide beneficial advice for environmental protection and technology improvement of spent LIB recovery. Besides, the practical industrial recycling processes are introduced according to their advantages and disadvantages. And some recommendations are provided for existing problems. Based on current recycling technologies, the challenges for spent LIB recovery are summarized and discussed from technological and environmental perspectives. Furthermore, great effort should be made to promote the development of spent LIB recovery in future research as follows: (1) gathering high-purity electrode materials by mechanical pretreatment; (2) green metals leaching from electrode materials; (3) targeted extraction of metals from electrode materials.

A Review on Battery Market Trends, Second-Life Reuse, and Recycling

“…Newer processing technologies, process design, and modelling for LIB recyclingwere discussed by Gaines [113], where the report shows that there are great improvements in the material separation in the recycling design as well as in-process modelling, however, of the several recycling methods reviewed none is ideal with each method having its own advantages and drawbacks. Spent LIB recovery is well illustrated by Xiao et al [114] as shown in Figure 12. Figure 12.…”

“…However, burning plastics will release a variety of highly hazardous chemicals, which leads to secondary pollution [24]. Except for the waste gas, the pyrometallurgy process also suffers from the waste slag (which requires disposal), high energy cost by mechanical treatment, and metal loss [114]. Umicore and BARTEC are the major companies adopting this methodology [24].…”

“…The advantage of hydrometallurgy is its high recovery rate. The downside of hydrometallurgy is it has many process steps compared to pyrometallurgy [114]. Currently, the majority of the recycling companies are adopting the pyrometallurgical process, mainly because of the lower cost and scalability [24].…”

“…However, it is becoming more favorable to use the hydrometallurgical process as Figure 12. Spent lithium-ion battery recovery process steps [114].…”

Intelligent optimization of bioleaching process for waste lithium‐ion batteries: An application of support vector regression approach

“…to get Co and Li compounds. 8 Biological process majorly includes bio-leaching. It is a growing field which involves the concepts of chemistry, biology and metallurgy.…”