Battery knowledge · Recycling and end of life
Slag
The molten layer of oxides that floats on the metal in a smelter, collecting aluminium, manganese, silicon and calcium, and lithium unless the process is designed to recover it. It is tapped separately and used in construction or, where it holds enough lithium, leached.
Example
Recycling and end of life: an example situation
High mass recovery alone does not establish battery-grade purity or refining energy demand.
Read Slag alongside Flue dust in this context. The fine solids caught from a furnace's off-gas. When a chloride flux is added to a battery smelter, lithium evaporates as lithium chloride and is recovered from the flue dust instead of being lost to the slag.
See it in the plant
- Charge: 30.38 t of cells go in with coke as reductant and silica and lime as flux.
- Melt: at 1200–1450 °C carbon and plastics burn and supply heat; the oxides of nickel, cobalt, copper and iron are reduced to metal.
- Separate: the heavy alloy collects at the bottom, 8120 kg, and is tapped, granulated and sent to the leach. Aluminium and manganese stay oxides in the slag, 9433 kg.
- Lithium: it stays in the slag and is lost to the loop on this setting.
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.