Current Trends in Spent Portable Lithium Battery Recycling

This paper provides an overview of the current state of the field in spent portable lithium battery recycling at both the research and industrial scales. The possibilities of spent portable lithium battery processing involving pre-treatment (manual dismantling, discharging, thermal and mechanical-physical pre-treatment), pyrometallurgical processes (smelting, roasting), hydrometallurgical processes (leaching followed by recovery of metals from the leachates) and a combination of the above are described. The main metal-bearing component of interest is the active mass or cathode active material that is released and concentrated by mechanical-physical pre-treatment procedures. The metals of interest contained in the active mass include cobalt, lithium, manganese and nickel. In addition to these metals, aluminum, iron and other non-metallic materials, especially carbon, can also be obtained from the spent portable lithium batteries. The work describes a detailed analysis of the current state of research on spent lithium battery recycling. The paper presents the conditions, procedures, advantages and disadvantages of the techniques being developed. Moreover, a summary of existing industrial plants that are focused on spent lithium battery recycling is included in this paper.