The days of casual disposal of spent batteries into Land fill is coming to an end. Quite apart from the waste of useful resources, disposal of these items represents a significant environmental threat to surface and ground waters. AIC has previously developed recovery systems for lead and zinc using electrochemical techniques and devices and has used some of these technologies to recover copper, zinc and lead from mine waste and other waste streams. Unlike conventional metal recovery, the wastes are often a mix of metal cations in various oxidation states mixed with a much higher concentration of materials of no economic value. This presents something of a problem to would be clean-up and material recovery operations. Using a combination of specialized electrochemical cells coupled to compatible techniques like ion exchange and specially selected processing electrolytes it is possible to recover most of the economic value from lithium ion and nickel metal hydride batteries. The paper will present some of our experiments and techniques that may be deployed.
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