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

TLDR

Spent lithium‑ion battery recovery has become urgent for environmental protection and social needs, yet recycling technologies cannot keep pace with the rapid growth of the LIB market. The study aims to improve industrial processing of spent LIBs by proposing recommendations and outlining future research directions for high‑purity electrode material gathering, green metal leaching, and targeted metal extraction. The authors classify recovery into three stages—gathering electrode materials, separating metal elements, and recycling the separated metals—and analyze each step, presenting practical industrial processes with their advantages and disadvantages. Current recycling technologies reveal significant technological and environmental challenges in spent LIB recovery, which the paper summarizes and discusses.

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.