novel solution to recycle world's batteries - lithium ion rechargeable battery
Washington: Scientists have created a solvent that can extract valuable elements from waste batteries and potentially help reduce the amount of electronic waste that eventually enters the landfill.
The team from Rice University in the United States used an eco-friendly deep co-crystalline solvent to extract valuable elements from metal oxides commonly used as lithium cathodeion batteries.
The goal is to reduce the use of harsh processes to recycle batteries and exclude them from landfill sites.
This solvent is made of commodity products, chloride choline and ethylene glycol, which extract more than cobalt from powder compounds and a small but still large amount of cobalt from used batteries.
"Waste of rechargeable batteries, especially lithium
As demand for these batteries increases dramatically for electric cars and other gadgets, ion batteries will become an increasingly threatening environmental challenge in the future, "said Pulickel Ajayan, a scientist at Rice University.
"It is important to recover strategic metals with limited supplies, such as cobalt, which are critical to the performance of these energy sources
Storage devices, "said Ajayan.
"One thing we can learn from the current state of our plastics is that now is the time to develop a comprehensive strategy for recycling the growing battery waste," he said . ".
"Tried this method with acid before.
They are effective, but they are corrosive, not ecological.
Friendly, "said Kimmai Tran, lead author of the study published in the journal Natural Energy.
"Recycling lithium as a whole
"Ion batteries are usually expensive and a risk for workers," Tran said . ".
Tran said the solution consists of a chicken feed additive and a common plastic precursor that can dissolve a wide variety of metal oxides.
The researchers made small prototype batteries and cycled 300 times before exposing the electrodes to the same conditions.
It turns out that this solvent is good at dissolving cobalt and lithium while separating the metal oxide from other compounds present in the electrode.
They found that cobalt can be recovered from the solution by precipitation or even plating to the steel mesh, since the latter method may allow repeated use of the deep co-crystal solvent itself.
"We focus on cobalt.
From a resource perspective, this is the most critical part, "said Marco rodrís, a postdoctoral fellow at Argonne National Laboratory in the United States.
"There will definitely be a lot of batteries in your phone.