How

Lithium-ion batteries are at the heart of nearly every electric vehicle, laptop and smartphone, and they are essential to storing renewable energy in the face of the climate emergency. But current mining operations cannot extract enough lithium and other key minerals to meet skyrocketing demand for these batteries. Establishing new mines is an expensive, years-long effort. And mining also creates a host of environmental headaches—such as depleting local water resources and polluting the nearby region with runoff debris—that have led to protests against new mines of this  the ability to recycle existing batteries is crucial for sustainably shifting the global energy system. But recycling lithium-ion batteries has only recently made commercial inroads. Battery manufacturers have hesitated over concerns that recycled products may be lower in quality than those built from newly mined minerals, potentially leading to shorter battery life or damage to the battery’s innards. Consequences could be serious, particularly in an application such as an electric vehicle.new research published in Joule has hit upon what experts describe as a more elegant recycling method that refurbishes the cathode—the carefully crafted crystal that is the lithium-ion battery’s most expensive component and key to supplying the proper voltage. The researchers found that batteries they made with their new cathode-recycling technique perform just as well as those with a cathode made .In fact, batteries with the recycled cathode both last longer and charge faster. The team’s approach and successful demonstration are “very unique and very impressive,” says Kang Xu, an electrochemist at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, who was not involved in the study.           A JOKE NO MORE

Yan Wang, a materials science professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and co-author of the new study, started researching battery recycling 11 years ago. At the time, he says, “some people joked with me, ‘There’s not enough batteries for you to recycle.’” That joke is not aging well. The Departmentof Energy estimates the battery market may grow 10-fold over the next decade. To ease the market’s growing pains, “recycling of lithium-ion batteries—gettingthat material back into the supply chain—is critical,” says Dave Howell, director of the DOE’s Vehicle Technologies Office. The DOE funded the new research as part of its massive effort to spur large-scale battery recycling innovations in the U.S.When a lithium-ion battery is providing power, a cluster of lithium ions moves from one crystalline “cage” (the anode) to another (the cathode). The most common methods currently used to recycle these batteries involve dismantling and shredding the whole battery, then either melting it all down or dissolving it in acid. The result is a black mass—with a texture can that can vary from powder to goo—from which chemical elements or simplecompounds can be salvaged. Those recovered products can then go through the same commercial manufacturing process that newly mined elements do to make cathodes.Wang and his colleagues use a very similar process—but instead of completely breaking the battery down to its constituent chemical elements, their technique keeps Wang and his colleagues use asimilar process—but instead of completely breaking the battery down to its constituent chemical elements, their technique keeps some of the old cathode’s crucial composition intact. After they shred the battery, they physically remove