The demand for lithium-ion batteries for use in electromobility, green energy storage and electronics, keeps rising, and with it the need for a stable supply of raw materials. The EU has designated lithium, cobalt and natural graphite as “critical” materials for economic progress. But conventional recycling processes are not yet sophisticated enough to recover metals like lithium, cobalt, copper and nickel.

Step in The Centre for Solar Energy and Hydrogen Research Baden-Württemberg (ZSW): The institution has just received funding of €870,000 from the state’s Ministry of Economic Affairs, Labour and Housing to investigate how to reclaim battery electrodes in a two-year project called RecycleMat.

“Future demand for lithium-ion batteries…will surely be enormous,” says Dr Margret Wohlfahrt-Mehrens, head of Accumulators Materials Research at ZSW, in a press release. “The development of a recycling concept to recover as much raw material from spent batteries as possible can be decisive to the sustainable supply of these resources and could considerably reduce the amount of material and energy required for new cells.”

Cathodes are made of layered metal oxides which contain more than 10 percent cobalt, for example, and the cobalt mainly comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo where working conditions and environmental practices are often less than ideal.

The RecycleMat feasibility study (short for “Cathode and Anode Materials from Recycled Lithium Ion Batteries”) will develop sustainable recycling processes to recover critical metals from discarded battery electrodes. The ZSW will investigate how to separate components from end-of-life batteries, or from waste produced during manufacturing processes, by predominantly mechanical means. Once the components are broken down into smaller units, a thermochemical treatment will be used to purify the elements.