Selective lithium recovery via solubility-driven cobalt elimination in supercritical CO2: A new strategy for recycling lithium from spent lithium-ion batteries

Key Points

• The aim is to develop an efficient method for selectively recovering lithium while eliminating cobalt from spent lithium-ion batteries.
• Utilized P(B12C4EMAAm-grad-FDA) copolymer for lithium transport.
• Employed bipyridine as a chelating ligand to eliminate cobalt.
• Measured recovery yields for lithium and cobalt.
• Achieved lithium recovery yield of 40% and cobalt recovery yield of less than 2%.
• Increased lithium-cobalt separation factor from 6.2 to 34.8, indicating a significant improvement.