(Invited) Towards Scalable and Low-Cost Direct Recycling of Lithium-Ion Batteries

The increasing amount of lithium-ion battery (LIBs) consumption will result in the resource shortage and price increase of lithium and precious transition metals that are critical for making high-performance LIBs. Also, future batteries that mainly use low-cost materials (Na, Fe, Mn) will have limited economic benefits to recycle even though the wastes generated from disposal of used batteries can cause severe environment pollution. In this context, design of low-cost and scalable recycling and regeneration process for spent batteries is attracting growing interest. This talk will focus on our recent progress on direct recycling and regeneration spent LIBs, which can lead to new electrode materials that can show the same level of performance as the native materials. We will show successful recycling of various battery materials, including cathode (LiMO 2 , LiMn 2 O 4 , and LiFePO 4 ) and anode (graphite) using the direct regeneration approach. We will discuss how we integrate different operation steps into a pathway for scalable directly recycling.