Vital developments in battery recycling

The theme of Recycle Week 2022, which runs from 17 to 23 October, is 'Let's Get Real about recycling' and will challenge perceptions and myths around recycling, and target contamination to improve recycling behaviours.

The research by Professor Satheesh Krishnamurthy and his team on recycling of batteries for sustainable environment has been chosen as science highlights by UK national synchrotron, plasma jet printing article and addresses the very real issue of battery recycling.

Without batteries, there are no electric vehicles. More importantly, there are no mobile phones too. It may be surprising to know, that the world is almost at a point where there are more mobile phones than people on the planet. Without vital components of the supply chain – mining, production of cathodes and anodes, battery manufacturing, and used-battery recycling – Electric Vehicle (EV) batteries could not be produced at scale.

Most important of all is the recycling of spent Lithium-ion batteries. Professor Satheesh Krishnamurthy and his team, together with Professor Martha, Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad, and NILE Limited in India found a low-cost method to recycle, reuse and up-cycle Lithium-ion batteries. Graphite is an integral part of lithium-ion batteries (LIBs). However, due to limited resources and high production costs, producing battery-grade graphite to meet the increasing demands for energy storage devices is becoming a challenge. In their research, they not only extract battery components but also used a new plasma-based printing process to make new electrodes out of extracted graphite and showed better performance. 

These methods are encouraging as they push the technology towards the resilience of materials and address sustainability.  

The team will conduct further studies to understand how the plasma jet printing process affects electrode characteristics. This work is part of a larger project to recycle complete LIBs, and even upcycle the materials to produce higher-value products. Efforts to recycle graphite from spent batteries into new anodes are a good step forwards on an essential journey.