Electrochemical route to extracting lithium ions from ‘black mass’ could lead to more efficient battery recycling

Black mass is the powdered material resulting from shredding end-of-life lithium-ion vehicle batteries. For effective recycling, lithium must be efficiently separated from this material, but conventional methods, such as smelting at high temperatures or dissolving in strong acids, require large amounts of energy and chemicals, and generate substantial volumes of liquid waste. Now, researchers at Rice University have taken a step toward a lower-energy and more environmentally friendly method with an electrochemical approach that uses the battery’s own chemistry to isolate lithium in a form (highly pure LiOH) that can be reused in new batteries.

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