993
Japan finds a way to recover 90% of lithium from old EV batteries
(www.techspot.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 14 Apr 2026
993 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
83799 readers
3165 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
"The process starts with old batteries being separated and burned to strip away non-metal components. What's left gets crushed into something called black mass. This is essentially a powder packed with recoverable metals. From there, a water-based chemical treatment called hydrometallurgy pulls the lithium out. One clever distinction in this new process is that the recovered lithium hydroxide actually replaces a chemical traditionally used during refining. This cuts the carbon footprint by about 40% compared to older methods."
Article also said that previous methods got about 45% of the lithium from recycling.
seems like a significant breakthrough
Nowhere near the advertised 90% in the title tho
Pretty metal
HAIL SATAN
WORSHIP DOOM
Lithium can be a pretty metal, but I'm not sure it looks its best in this state.
Brutal
But still lithe.
Dumb question... how are they burning them? I thought controlling lithium battery fires was difficult?
They are hard to put out, but if you want them to burn all you really need is a safe place to do it. So in a big crucible with some type of fume extraction so they aren't crazy polluting the air. As long as the heat has somewhere safe to go and there isn't anything else to catch on fire, burning things is easy.
Yeah the air pollution is what I’d be most worried about if this becomes scalable.