Anna Vanderbuggen came up with an innovative way to extract black mass from used batteries. (Image Credit: Dimitri_K/pixabay)
The European Institute of Innovation and Technology presented Anna Vanderbuggen, a 29-year-old French researcher, with an award for her approach that extracts graphite from old lithium-ion batteries. She achieved this by removing the graphite from a black mass containing nickel, cobalt, lithium, and manganese. Even though up to 25% of the batteries’ weight consists of graphite, nobody formed a viable plan to recycle it.
She developed her method at the Helmholtz Research Institute in Freiberg, Germany, and it involves adding chemicals, water, and air bubbles into the black mass. The graphite then attaches to the air bubbles while the metals stay within the water since they’re hydrophilic.
“Battery manufacturers were not interested” in recycled graphite until now because “they could get it at low cost in China,” Vanderbruggen told AFP.
Now that more people are buying EVs, battery demand to power them also increases, which raises prices. According to Philippe Barboux, a Paris Science of Lattres University chemistry professor, lithium prices have gone up by 13% in five years. It’s also becoming more difficult to find graphite because Europe is relying less on other sources in other countries, including China.
Extracting materials from old batteries to create new ones can help address those supply issues. “In 10 years’ time, so many batteries will be manufactured that lithium will absolutely have to be recycled; otherwise, there won’t be enough,” Barboux told AFP
And according to a study, recycled batters could outperform the new types. However, this may have to wait a decade because there aren’t enough batteries to recycle. “It’s a huge growing market, and we want to play a role in it,” Ken Nagayama of German metals supplier Aurubis told AFP. He also believes there will be “sufficient market supply to develop a battery recycling plant in industrial scale during the second half of the decade.”
Aurubis says it can take out 95% of the metals in black mass and still needs to develop a technique for graphite extraction. Additionally, AFP says that the EU is working toward adding recycled materials into new batteries by 2031 with plans to recycle 70% of the batteries’ weight.
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