Submitted 1 year ago by qyron@sopuli.xyz to [deleted]
It very much depends on the battery type:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_recycling
And for Li-ion batteries there’s several ways listed. None of which is perfect I guess.
To digress a little:
the biggest problem are batteries that aren’t recycled at all. Thrown away. “Forgotten” inside a toy etc.
Meanwhile, just last week: Battery breakthrough as 99.99% of lithium extracted from old cells
nice
Let’s hope it replaces the old methods real soon!
They are shredded to small pieces. Magnet separates all ferromagnetic parts, like steel casings. There can also be other separation methods such as flotation. Various non-ferromagnetic materials such as zinc and manganese can be dissolved in sulfuric acid. In order to speed things up, leaching is done at an elevated temperature.
In the next stage, Mn and Zn are precipitated as hydroxides using submerging like sodium hydroxide for example. There are other options too. You could also melt the batteries and separate the metals that way. If you use pyrometallurgy instead of hydrometallurgy, you’ll be using a lot more energy.
Use to work In a recycling warehouse for plastics, the amount of batteries that would run through our line then get compressed in a baler or shredded was ridiculous.
I swear we would have monthly fires, our local fire department probably hated us.
That’s the neat part… they’re not.
At lease some of them get ground up and turned into corn fertilizer.
BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
The simplified answer is, they get shredded, then various processes both physical and chemical are taken to extract the important materials and the rest is disposed of. Often certain metals will dissolve in specific acids or chemicals, then you can take that liquid with the specifically dissolved metal and precipitate it out.