Scientists Recover 95% of Metals from Dead Batteries

Scientists at Monash University just cracked a massive problem: how to safely recover precious metals trapped inside the world's growing mountain of dead batteries.

Right now, only 10 percent of batteries get recycled in Australia. The rest end up in landfills, where toxic chemicals leak into soil and water.

Dr. Parama Chakraborty Banerjee and PhD student Parisa Biniaz developed a new recycling method that recovers more than 95 percent of critical metals like lithium, cobalt, nickel and copper from spent batteries. The process uses a mild, sustainable solvent instead of the dangerous high temperatures and harsh chemicals traditional recycling requires.

Around 500,000 tonnes of dead batteries have already piled up worldwide. Each one contains valuable strategic metals that countries desperately need for new technology.

"This is the first report of selective recovery of high-purity minerals from spent battery waste using a mild solvent," Dr. Banerjee said. The team's approach is safer for workers, gentler on the environment, and produces metals pure enough to use again.

The method works even on black mass, the complex mixture of materials inside old batteries that makes recycling so difficult. That means the process could handle the messy reality of industrial-scale recycling, not just clean samples in a lab.

The Ripple Effect

This discovery reaches far beyond battery recycling. The same gentle extraction process could recover valuable metals from other electronic waste and even mine tailings, the leftover materials from mining operations.

As electric vehicles and renewable energy storage explode in popularity, demand for lithium and cobalt is skyrocketing. Being able to recycle these metals domestically means countries can rely less on mining and importing, making clean energy technology more sustainable from start to finish.

Biniaz called the breakthrough "a major step closer to a circular economy for critical metals." Instead of mining virgin materials, using them once, and tossing them in landfills, we could mine old batteries to make new ones.

The research shows that cutting-edge recycling technology can be both more effective and more environmentally friendly than old methods. One solution just solved multiple problems at once.