Recycling Lithium-Ion Batteries Defined: The two Strategies

Hydrometallurgical recycling, in the meantime, makes use of water-based solvents to recycle “black mass” — the business time period for ground-up batteries — or to refine the metals extracted from batteries utilizing pyrometallurgy. “The important thing advantages of hydrometallurgical recycling are that extra of the precious metals could be recovered, and it’s much less vitality intensive than pyrometallurgical recycling,”  IDTechEx’s Nichols continued. “The prices of reagents and excessive volumes of water consumption additionally pose some downsides. Nevertheless, some recyclers [claim] that they’re able to cycle water a number of occasions via the recycling course of to maximise its effectivity.”

Nichols added that whereas many of the hydrometallurgical recycling amenities are positioned within the Asia-Pacific area, some Western amenities perceive how each recycling strategies profit the opposite and are including hydrometallurgical capability to their present pyrometallurgical amenities. Hopefully, we’ll see a future the place extra vitality would not must be expended to ship battery supplies midway all over the world to permit them to be absolutely recycled.