Recycling and Reuse of End-of-Life Lithium-Ion Batteries: Challenges and Strategies–2nd Edition

Dear Colleagues,

Lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) are electrochemical energy storage devices that have revolutionized our daily life since their commercialization, enabling the diffusion of portable devices and boosting the electric vehicle market. Associated with their widespread application in several sectors, the inevitable consequence is an ever-growing volume of end-of-life lithium-ion batteries, which poses urgent challenges for the proper management of waste. Indeed, LIBs are complex and compact objects, containing a wide range of different materials (metal foils and wires, plastic cases and separators, oxide powders, organic solvents, salts, etc.). Moreover, the essential components of the batteries contain valuable critical raw materials, such as lithium, cobalt, and nickel; the recovery of such elements has the potential to form the basis of a beneficial circular economy scheme. Today, the available industrial technologies for LIB recycling are not able to satisfy the requirements for environmental sustainability and do not allow for the recovery of all the valuable elements; efforts are needed to identify new solutions in the complex sequence of steps following the disposal of waste LIBs, including proper sorting, discharging, dismantling, reuse, or recycling.

In this Special Issue, we present contributions addressing, but not limited to, these major topics: defining protocols and strategies, highlighting challenges, and identifying possible routes for the management of the various aspects involved in the recycling and reuse of lithium-ion batteries. The wide spectrum of topics and approaches considered here is necessary to fully address such a complex challenge.

• Protocols for pre-treatments, cell discharge, and cell disassembly at laboratory and industrial scale;
• Protocols for the robust and fast analysis of the state of health and charge of the battery;
• Processes and materials for the degradation of battery components (cathode, anode, electrolytes, and current collectors);
• Processes and materials for the recovery of critical/strategic raw materials through the isolation of target elements via separation, precipitation, and filtration;
• The upcycling and recycling of different components of waste lithium-ion batteries (cathode, anode, electrolytes, and current collectors);
• The regeneration and healing of degraded battery components (cathode, anode, electrolytes, and current collectors) for their direct recycling;
• Assessment of the environmental and economical sustainability of all the above-mentioned aspects;
• New perspectives on the development of new-generation lithium-ion battery materials and designs to enable easy recycling.

Prof. Dr. Elza Bontempi
Dr. Chiara Ferrara
Guest Editors

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• end-of-life lithium-ion batteries
• recycling
• critical and strategic raw materials
• second life
• circular economy
• sustainability

• Recycling and Reuse of End-of-Life Lithium-Ion Batteries: Challenges and Strategies in Batteries (10 articles)