As part of awards announced recently by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) for the Battery Recycling, Reprocessing, and Battery Collection Funding Opportunity, DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory’s Principal Materials Scientist Albert Lipson will lead a team of collaborators from Argonne and industry partners in developing economical methods to collect and extract battery materials from devices like smartphones, tablets, laptops, watches, and lithium battery-powered toys and tools. The project is funded by DOE’s Vehicle Technologies Office (VTO). The ultimate goal is to make battery recycling safer and more cost-effective, so that the general public will have more opportunities and incentives to recycle.

”This project will give us the opportunity to rethink how consumer electronics batteries will get recycled,  eliminating the hazard to workers and the public while making it more profitable to recycle these batteries,” said Lipson.

The team is working on two approaches to eliminate the need for human workers to dismantle devices by hand. One option is to safely shred the electronics whole and then separate out the valuable battery components. Another is to employ automated systems to take the devices apart. ​“This will make the recycling of devices significantly cheaper, as hand dismantling devices that are not meant to be dismantled can take a long time,” Lipson said. ​“Imagine having to take apart earbuds that are glued together to get just a tiny battery that can be recycled. This just isn’t practical commercially.”

They’ll also create fire-resistant bags that can be easily used by the public to have their device shipped to a recycling facility. ​“These bags will use innovative materials that can absorb heat and insulate the battery,” said Lipson. ​“They will be designed such that if one battery has an issue and catches on fire, it won’t spread to other items in the shipment or the facility.”

Lipson, along with Argonne principal materials scientists Yuepeng Zhang and Jessica Durham Macholz and chemist Chen Liao, are working with companies California Electronic Asset Recovery Inc., Princeton NuEnergy and Flexcon. Their collaborations will lead to new tools and processes that are applicable in the real world.

Argonne is supporting three other VTO-funded projects being led by industry partners as part of the Battery Recycling, Reprocessing, and Battery Collection Funding Opportunity. Lipson and Macholz, as well as Argonne researchers Jeff Spangenberger and Qiang Dai will support development of AI-automated sorting techniques that can reduce transport costs by consolidating sorting and preprocessing at a single facility and creation of a system that can be deployed to collection sites to render the batteries safe for transportation.