Researchers at the University of Birmingham have announced a new approach for recycling the most expensive materials in electric car batteries, which entails using less hazardous chemicals than current recycling systems.
The new method uses organic acids like vitamin c as a leaching agent and has been tested on cathode materials (which are used in lithium batteries) from a Nissan Leaf battery cell.
The testing showed that ascorbic acid selectively reaches low value electrode material and leaves the higher value nickel and cobalt based materials in a solid state, which means it can then be directly recycled.
The team is now working on scaling up the approach and looking for long term partners for studies looking at infrastructure as well as further research to develop the system.
“Battery chemistry, and cathode chemistry in particular is constantly evolving to meet the demand for greater energy density,” said University of Birmingham Centre for Energy Storage’s Professor Peter Slater.
Subscribe to Sustainability Beat for free
Sign up here to get the latest sustainability news sent straight to your inbox everyday
“However, battery recycling has remained relatively static, and has focused on breaking down the cathodes into their individual element components particularly when recycling mixed chemistries, which loses a lot on the internal value of the cathode material”.
He continued: “Our method will reduce the cost and number of steps to recover cathode materials, so they can be remanufactured and put back into new batteries, with minimal environmental footprint”.
Lithium batteries are hard to recycle because they are large complex and can be dangerous if they are taken apart incorrectly.
Over the past three years the UK has seen an 83% in hybrid and electric vehicle sales, however there are concerns around the pace of infrastructure development.
