Lithium-ion batteries are at the heart of many of the tech devices we use daily ­– including smartphones, laptops and electric vehicles. But these products, and the batteries that power them, have a limited lifetime and so it’s clear how we could quickly become inundated with batteries in need of disposal. Li-ion battery production relies on raw materials sourced by mining and their disposal presents hazardous environmental waste. To manage these issues, recycling has become a more attractive option, allowing for the recovery of critical materials within the batteries, which in turn creates a vital circular, sustainable industry. One person’s hazardous waste is another person’s precious metal.

But recycling lithium-ion batteries is more complicated than dealing with normal household waste and requires dedicated expertise, in particular for electric vehicle batteries that are made up of hundreds of lithium cells. Do we simply recover the wiring and leave the precious metals that are harder to separate, or do we shred the whole battery and melt down or dissolve the waste? Is it economical to dismantle the components to separate out the different parts for individual processing? The route to recycling depends on the most efficient use of our time and resources, our technical expertise, and the economic value of the reclaimed materials.

Lithium-ion battery recycling has become big business and is a growing industry. It is also necessarily a big topic in scientific research that looks to find ways to recycle batteries efficiently, while at the same time finding ways to design batteries with a longer lifetime and make them easier to recycle or reuse.

In this webinar you will meet scientists whose research focuses on various aspects of recycling lithium-ion batteries. They will look at the problem from a global perspective across different industries and detail some of the ways in which researchers are finding ways to recycle batteries efficiently and on a large, sustainable scale.

Our guest speakers

 

Emma Kendrick

Emma Kendrick

Emma Kendrick is Professor of energy materials, in the School of metallurgy and materials at the University of Birmingham, UK, co-director of the Centre for energy storage and group lead of the energy materials group.

Before academia, Emma led innovations in the battery industry, latterly as chief technologist in energy storage at Sharp Laboratories of Europe Ltd (SLE) and prior to that for two lithium-ion battery SMEs, Fife Batteries Ltd and Surion Energy Ltd.

Emma holds a PhD from Keele University, UK, a MSc in new materials from the University of Aberdeen, UK and a BSc in chemistry from the University of Manchester, UK. She has been recognised for her research in sustainable batteries and her continued support to the research community through several awards.

Read more about Emma Kendrick here

 

Linda Gaines

Linda Gaines

Linda Gaines is a Transportation systems analyst in the Energy systems and infrastructure analysis division at Argonne National Laboratory, US. She holds a BA in chemistry and physics from Harvard, US and a PhD. in physics from Columbia, US.

Linda’s primary interest is problem solving, applied to efficient use of resources. She began her career at Argonne by writing a series of handbooks of energy and material flows in energy-intensive industries that provided background for studies of technical and institutional issues involved in producing and recycling advanced-design automobiles, trucks, and trains, and batteries. Her most recent work has involved studying ways to reduce impacts from transport by recycling of lithium-ion batteries. She is an editor of the journal Sustainable Materials and Technologies and on the editorial board of Scientific Reports.

Read more about Linda Gaines here

Chemistry World May 2023 cover

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