Battery knowledge · Recycling and end of life
Bioleaching
Leaching metals with acids produced by bacteria or fungi instead of added mineral acid. It uses less energy and chemistry but is slow, and remains at laboratory and pilot scale for batteries.
Example
Recycling and end of life: an example situation
High mass recovery alone does not establish battery-grade purity or refining energy demand.
Read Bioleaching alongside Hydrometallurgy in this context. Recycling by dissolving black mass in acid and separating the metals as salts by precipitation and solvent extraction. It recovers lithium and gives battery-grade products, at the cost of chemical consumption and wastewater.
Use in Lemonergy
Distinguish recovered material from a qualified product.
This is a reference concept. No executable Lemonergy block has been verified for this term.
References & further reading
Further reading on this topic
These sources provide broader context; they are not presented as citations for every statement in this entry.
- Lithium-Ion Battery Recycling
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Topic background · Battery construction, recycling routes and U.S. waste-management context.
- Recycling lithium-ion batteries from electric vehicles
Gavin Harper et al. · Nature · 2019
Topic background · Reuse, disassembly and mechanical, hydro-, pyro- and direct recycling routes.