Chemists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison have discovered a cost-effective way to recycle lithium from old electric vehicle batteries, which could benefit the planet and reduce battery manufacturing costs.
According to a news release from the university, many automakers have shown interest in recycling or reusing the lithium in spent batteries, but the process is typically cost-prohibitive. However, the research team believes a new, sustainable electrochemical method could solve this problem, and a patent has already been filed through the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, in hopes of scaling up the process.
The study, published in the journal ACS Energy Letters, reveals that the system is "composed of a Li+-extraction cell and a Li+-recovery cell," which can recover lithium from old batteries cheaply using a simple process.
Kyoung-Shin Choi, a UW-Madison chemistry professor and an expert in electrochemistry, led the team in developing the cutting-edge method, which involves extracting the lithium ions from spent batteries and releasing them in a solution to "recover them as high-purity lithium chemicals."
Choi said that figuring out a cheaper way to recycle lithium is crucial since the metal is a core component of EV batteries and will be in higher demand as more people adopt electric cars. While lithium-iron-phosphate batteries, which are now widely used by manufacturers such as Tesla, are affordable to produce, recycling them is another story.
"At this point, there's no economically compelling method to recover lithium from spent LFP batteries even though the market is shifting to them," Choi commented, adding that it's often cheaper for companies to mine lithium than recycle it because of technological limitations and market conditions, even though this is much more environmentally damaging.
And with the European Union enforcing new regulations on automakers to produce more sustainable batteries and recycle at least 65% of them by the end of 2025, according to EV Boosters, there's an urgent need for more recycled lithium. As UW-M stated, the EU also passed a law that will require new EVs to be built with a certain amount of recycled lithium by 2031.
Choi and her team's method of recovering lithium is not only more cost-effective than current methods, but also less energy-intensive and wasteful. "While recovering Li+, these cells also regenerate the acid consumed for Li+ leaching, minimizing the chemicals needed and the waste generated, enabling sustainable and environmentally benign Li+ recycling," the authors wrote in the paper.
The team tested the process on a commercial LFP battery and black mass, a powdery material containing valuable metals that remains after spent batteries are processed to separate their components.
Several battery and automakers have shown interest in the electrochemical process and have inquired about its commercial viability. Choi and her colleagues are now working on a prototype of the tech, and Choi is developing a startup to hopefully bring it to market. If it's successful, it could be a game-changer for the EV industry.
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"The technology works, but it is important to scale it up in the most cost-effective manner," Choi said, noting that the key to mass-scale lithium recycling will be incorporating the "production and use of black mass" into the process.
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