Waste lithium batteries contain a large amount of non-renewable and economically valuable metal resources, such as cobalt, lithium, nickel, copper, and aluminum. If waste or substandard lithium batteries can be effectively recycled and processed, it will not only reduce the environmental pressure of waste batteries, but also avoid the waste of metal resources such as cobalt and nickel.
Changzhou Jinchuang Bofan Energy New Materials Co., Ltd. has partnered with universities to establish a research group supported by Jiangsu Technical Teachers College and the Jiangsu Provincial Key Laboratory of Precious Metal Deep Processing Technology and Application. The project focuses on the recovery of valuable metals from waste lithium-ion batteries. After three years of research and development, the company has solved the problems of complex operation, long process, and environmental hazards caused by organic solvents in the production process. The project has shortened the process flow, reduced power consumption, and improved the metal recovery rate, purity, and recovery volume, resulting in the achievement of "a fully enclosed clean recycling process for 8,000 tons of waste lithium battery metals per year and its application".
The project falls under the field of solid waste resource utilization and application. The technical principle is to use hydrometallurgical technology to separate and recover non-ferrous metals, including leaching, solution purification and enrichment, solvent extraction, etc. In addition, electrometallurgical technology, namely electrowinning, is used to finally obtain elemental metal products.
The technical approach is as follows: First, the waste lithium batteries are pre-treated, including discharging, dismantling, crushing, and sorting; the plastic and iron shells after dismantling are recycled; and the sorted electrode materials are subjected to alkaline leaching, acid leaching, and impurity removal before extraction.
Extraction is a crucial step, separating copper from cobalt and nickel. Copper enters an electrodeposition cell for electrowinning to produce electrowinning copper products. The cobalt and nickel solutions after extraction are then extracted and separated again. After crystallization and concentration, cobalt salts and nickel salts are obtained directly. Alternatively, the cobalt and nickel separated by extraction enter an electrodeposition cell separately to obtain electrowinning cobalt and electrowinning nickel products.
The recovery rates of cobalt, copper, and nickel in the electrodeposition process reach 99%, with grades of 99.98%, 99.95%, and 99.2%–99.9%, respectively. Cobalt sulfate and nickel sulfate products also meet relevant standards.
Based on the optimized research results, this project will carry out large-scale and industrialized research and development and construction, and build a fully enclosed clean production line for waste lithium ions with an annual recycling capacity of 8,000 tons, recovering 1,500 tons of cobalt, 1,200 tons of copper and 420 tons of nickel, with a total output value of over 400 million yuan.
The large-scale application of wet heavy metal recycling technology is, to our knowledge, unprecedented in China and rare abroad.
This achievement provides guidance for the recycling of metal resources from waste lithium batteries nationwide and successfully fills a domestic gap; it is clean and environmentally friendly, low-cost, and highly profitable, giving it a significant competitive advantage among similar enterprises.
The wet recycling process integrates and simplifies the process flow, resulting in low energy consumption and high product recovery rate.
