Battery knowledge · Recycling and end of life
Mechanical pre-treatment
The front end of most recycling plants: shredding cells or modules, drying off the electrolyte and separating the stream into casings, copper and aluminium foil, plastics and black mass. How cleanly this is done sets the purity, and the cost, of everything downstream. [1]
- Also called
- mechanical processing
Example
Recycling and end of life: an example situation
High mass recovery alone does not establish battery-grade purity or refining energy demand.
Read Mechanical pre-treatment alongside Black mass in this context. The dark powder of mixed electrode materials left after end-of-life cells are discharged, shredded and separated from their casings, foils and separators. It is the traded intermediate that hydrometallurgical refiners buy.
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.