Sustainable pre-treatment method for lithium-ion production scrap material recovery and reutilization.

Battery production scraps fundamentally consist of the same materials as EoL batteries that are considered conventional material flow in recycling. However, the properties of these materials are significantly different. The key difference is that scrap electrodes have not been assembled in batteries and hence the material is not degraded by exposure to electrolyte nor cycling and most of the safety risks related to battery pack recycling are avoided. Conventional battery recycling is designed to deal with the characteristics and hazards related to recycling of EoL battery packs and therefore it is based on destructive methods where high temperatures and aggressive leaching are used to recover most valuable elements. However, destructive approach is not necessary for the recycling of intact scrap material. This study focuses on the direct recycling of cathode production scraps, a novel non-destructive recycling approach. Direct recycling includes separation and reparation of the active material and direct reuse of the material in the production of new cells. In the case of production scraps this process can be simplified as no extensive material reparation is needed. The upscaling of this kind of direct recycling of production scrap requires fast, cheap, and reliable material liberation methods that prevail the material structure and electrochemical performance. Currently solvent methods and high temperature thermal treatment are widely used in industry to decompose the adhesion created by the binder between active material and the current collector. However, these methods struggle with environmental hazards, high energy intensity and demand for complicated further processing (Shin et al., 2023). To avoid these challenges, low temperature treatments are studied in different environments.