Recycling batteries involves shredding them into black mass [1] and then extracting lithium carbonate from it. This is the same stuff lithium from mines and brine fields is processed into [2]. (Carbonate is processed into lithium hydroxide [3], the stuff we trade [4] and mix in batteries.)
In summary, they all start with pulverized stuff from which lithium carbonate is extracted and turned into lithium hydroxide. The fact that it's batteries versus rock just changes the front end; nothing downstream could care less.
If they make it to that far. A really offensive thing in this area is disposable vapes. The rechargable ones are this close to being reusable. Heck if you take them apart and put in juice, they are. But the sheer number of them that just get thrown in the trash, with their lithium-ion battery, is disgusting. I ask all my friends that vape to give theirs to me when they die, then I take them apart and bring the batteries to a recycler. Those things should be illegal on the basis of wasting lithium but I assume they're made in China which is where a good portion of the world's lithium comes from, so there's little chance thet'll change be stopped.
Not sure how effective these schemes are - at least from what I've seen. There's a lot of "double dipping" i.e. people put it in designated recycling bins out of free will and then scavengers come to pull the worthy items out of those bins to get paid. Recycling hasn't been encouraged but money has been lost (paid out).
Often people that care about recycling aren't in it for the money and those that are don't care about actually recycling something.
Open top bins? Is that really a big problem, percentage-wise? I mean I'm sure it's a problem, but I'm skeptical it's that big a percentage. That's also one such way of dealing with the recycling and where it goes. Elsewhere I've seen machines which accept cans and such, and dispense value from fridge-size metal machines like at the grocery store.
Just like collecting cardboard, it only takes 1-2 people to go through streets / stations of bins for themselves. Literally every recycling bin I see at a station or otherwise is scavenged upon.
Haven't seen many more advanced machines here, but those go back to the same problem - it takes more time than dumping it into an open bin "on your way". This leads to people not recycling it.
There's also the fact that a lot of countries don't actually have the capabilities to recycle even if they collect it. Yes real capacity. It's been uncovered many times where recycling just takes a roundabout tour back to the dumps. There's also a huge amount of fraud in this area. Companies take the money and send to China or other places.
The theory of recycling is good but more needs to be done to actually get it going.
Batteries on the other hand... they're worth more so just maybe... but there have been lots of electronics recycling fraud just as well...
Hmmm so they don’t really disassemble the batteries. They just grind them all up and then use physical and chemical processes to filter the bits they want?
I guess this makes sense at scale. I’m not sure what I was picturing.
Generally, all forms of recycling that reauire manual dis-assebly don't really work. Labour cost is too much. Broken and damaged items dont dissasemble. each itme is unique, that sort of thing. Thats why plastic recycling and electribics recycling doesn't work.
Recycling of metals and glass succeedd because you can just grind and melt everything.
So when I’m asked to obsessively clean out my aluminum recycling, I’ve always assumed that’s just a favour to their equipment. But surely the process expects FOD and messy cans.
I've always wondered this. In my small town in The Netherlands, plastic and metal go in the same recycling sack. They specifically state that you don't need to obsessively clean the containers, but they should be "empty". I'm sure I've accidentally tossed some paper in there, but I assume that gets burned away at some point.
But how they sort it afterwards? I have no idea. Not all metal is conductive, though I have to assume they do some magnetized sorting. Plastic can probably be blown away for sorting further down the line.
Might need to explore this more in the near future!
There's a whole process. In the US, "Bulk Handling Systems" seems to be the leading company in the sorting of recyclables. There are shredders, shakers,
air separators to pull out the light stuff, DC magnets for ferrous metals, AC magnets for aluminum, multispectral vision sorters for different plastics, and even AI vision guided robot pickers. Most of the sorting is done with big, simple machines. The robotics just picks out unwanted stuff missed by the earlier steps to give clean product that can be sold. That was
a big insight in this business - you need some machine intelligence, but it's a small part of the overall system.
It's simpler and cheaper to machine sort the stuff at one location than have lots of little bins into which people mis-sort stuff. Most of the cost is out collecting the stuff, not sorting it, and single-stream recycling simplifies the collecting.
Isn't most plastic we'd think of recycling (bottles, food containers, utensils, etc) thermoplastic, and able to melted and reformed like you described?
I suppose they disassemble large racks of batteries, to remove the strong structural metal which us hard to shred, and maybe copper wires that are expensive. But not farther.
Individual cells are shredded, the cover metal is removed by magnets, anything soluble is removed by water or other solvents, whatever remains possibly may be further processed, or can go safely to a landfill.
I'm not really an expert, but one obvious thing is you need to take non-pure metals and purify them. Recyclable batteries fail when the chemicals instead chemically combine with something other what you intend them to, crystalize, or otherwise become not the pure metal you start with. That impure metal is not conceptually different from ore, and the same process to turn ore into battery material must be done.
Note that ore is more complex as you need to remove a lot more non-battery stuff, while in a used battery what you want is still in fairly high concentration, just not in the form a battery needs.
Generally yeah - it is both willing to give up and take back electrons pretty easily (so, discharging and charging) but in the modern era another really important factor is that it balances having these properties and also being very light relative to the amount of energy it can hold in a battery. Good for portable applications like cell phones, cars, etc.
Lithium is at the top, so you get the most voltage per molecule.
Then there’s other factors like discharge recharge, temperatures, all that, but lithium is basically the best if you can get the other factors to play nice too:
That was covered in my college chemistry class, but I took it 25 years ago and don't really remember the details. Electro negativity comes to mind, but I might have the terms wrong. In any case the laws of chemistry apply.
