Lithion Technologies (also known as Lithion Recycling), a Canadian cleantech company founded in 2017, provides a hydrometallurgy-based technology that recovers 95% of lithium-ion battery components and regenerates high-purity materials that can be used in the production of new rechargeable batteries. This technology significantly reduces the demand for the extraction of new raw materials and minimizes the ecological debt of electric vehicles.
Challenges: lithium battery recycling
Lithium and cobalt are used in the production of lithium-ion batteries; these materials must be recycled because they have a significant environmental impact. Today, only a small number of spent lithium-ion batteries are recycled, and the method for recycling these batteries has a significant environmental impact and fails to recover a significant amount of valuable materials.
The elements of a spent lithium-ion battery can be separated using pyrometallurgical techniques. Components of organics and polymers are burned by heating at a high temperature. Cobalt, copper, and nickel are melted to create an alloy, while the remaining elements become slag. Metal smelters purchase metal alloys for separation. Significantly, lithium is lost in these processes and cannot be recovered or resold. The sold alloy has a fraction of the value of the pure and separated metals.
Hydrometallurgical processes are often used to separate and purify the different metals contained in the cathode. In order to obtain relatively pure metals, these processes typically involve a leaching step to dissolve the metals oxide into the aqueous solution and various precipitations and separations steps. These processes are still in development and are expensive to operate. Also, the treatment of liquid waste is usually barely taken under consideration.
There is a need to be provided with a process which can economically process all types of used lithium-ion batteries at large scale industrial processes.
Lithion Technologies Technology
Lithion Technologies provides a method for recycling lithium-ion batteries comprising the processes:
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