Key issues for Li-ion battery recycling
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Review Key issues for Li-ion battery recycling
Linda Gaines, Kirti Richa and Jeffrey Spangenberger, Argonne National Laboratory, Lemont, Illinois 60439, USA Address all correspondence to Linda Gaines at [email protected] (Received 27 June 2018; accepted 13 September 2018)
ABSTRACT Concerted efforts by stakeholders could overcome the hurdles and enable a viable recycling system for automotive LIBs by the time many of them go out of service. Lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) were commercialized in the early 1990s and gained popularity first in consumer electronics, then more recently for electric vehicle (EV) propulsion, because of their high energy and power density and long cycle life. Their rapid adoption brings with it the challenge of end-of-life waste management. There are strong arguments for LIB recycling from environmental sustainability, economic, and political perspectives. Recycling reduces material going into landfills and avoids the impacts of virgin material production. LIBs contain highvalue materials like cobalt and nickel, so recycling can reduce material and disposal costs, leading to reduced EV costs. Battery recycling can also reduce material demand and dependence on foreign resources, such as cobalt from Democratic Republic of the Congo, where much production relies on armed aggression and child labor. Several companies are finding ways to commercialize recycling of the increasingly diverse LIB waste stream. Although Pb-acid battery recycling has been successfully implemented, there are many reasons why recycling of LIBs is not yet a universally well-established practice. Some of these are technical constraints, and others involve economic barriers, logistic issues, and regulatory gaps. This paper first builds a case as to why LIBs should be recycled, next compares recycling processes, and then addresses the different factors affecting LIB recycling to direct future work towards overcoming the barriers so that recycling can become standard practice. Keywords: recycling; Co; Li; lifecycle
DISCUSSION POINTS • S pent-battery collection, transportation, and recycling processes face economic barriers. • S everal methods for recycling LIBs have been demonstrated, and some are in commercial use, but none is ideal for all battery types and volumes. • F or a long-lived product like a vehicle battery, what will happen at the product’s EOL is often not a major design consideration.
Benefits of recycling Reduction of resource use There are concerns about the physical availability of the required mineral resources. Electric vehicles (EVs) are often promoted because of their ability to wean society from its dependence on petroleum, which is an increasingly scarce resource.
However, for EVs to be a plausible alternative, their use cannot entail switching dependence to another scarce resource. Therefore, considerable attention has been paid first to lithium and subsequently to cobalt and, to a lesser extent, nickel. Recently, the U.S. Department of the Interior published a draft list of critical minerals for
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