Battery knowledge · Recycling and end of life
Lithium recovery
Getting the lithium back, which smelting loses to slag and older hydrometallurgical flowsheets left until last at low yield. Newer routes take it out first — by roasting or carbonating black mass and washing out a lithium salt — before the other metals are leached. [1]
- Also called
- early lithium extraction, lithium-first recovery
Example
Recycling and end of life: an example situation
High mass recovery alone does not establish battery-grade purity or refining energy demand.
Read Lithium recovery alongside Collection and recycling targets in this context. The EU Battery Regulation’s quotas: portable batteries collected at 63 % by 2027 and 73 % by 2030, light-means-of-transport batteries at 51 % by 2028, with recycling efficiencies of 65 % for lithium-based batteries by 2025 and 70 % by 2030, and material recovery of 50 % of lithium by 2027 rising to 80 % by 2031.
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
Technical references
- Recycling lithium-ion batteries from electric vehicles
Gavin Harper et al. · Nature · 2019
Technical reference · Reuse, disassembly and mechanical, hydro-, pyro- and direct recycling routes.
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.