Development of a life cycle based process for cobalt recovering from cell batteries

Abstract

Considering the great challenge of managing waste from electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) , it is essential the creation of new recycling processes to allow efficiently the extraction of resources from this waste. Brazilians discarded about 114 million cell phones per year, and it represents an annual average amount of 456 tonnes of discarded cobalt that are in the Lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) of these cell phones. This value is higher than Brazil's production of cobalt in 2016 (400 tonnes), which was the last year that the country produced refined cobalt. The environmental impact from the implementation of mining processes is one of the biggest challenges to make these processes viable. However, recycling processes also have environmental impacts, whether through consumptions of energy, water, and other inputs. In this research the environmental impacts of five different developed and tested processes (scenarios) were developed and tested in one of the laboratories of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (COPPE/SAGE - Laboratory of Sustainable Production) to recover cobalt from cell phones Lithium-ion batteries (LIBs). The obtained results on the environmental impacts were compared with a reference scenario, related to obtaining of virgin cobalt from nature. This comparison was made using a methodology based on LCA (ISO 14040) to contrast environmental impacts. Overall, all five cobalt recycling routes developed in the laboratory had better environmental performance than the baseline scenario, however, the scenario considering the use of sodium sulphide as precipitating agent presented the best performance in most of the analysed environmental impact categories, obtaining reduction percentages of 43%, 90%, 96%, 98% and 72% for the Climate Change (GWP 100), Terrestrial Acidification (TA), Metal Depletion (MD), Water Depletion (WD) impact categories) and Fossil Depletion (FD) respectively. • Brazilians discarded about 114 million cell phones batteries per year; • In Brazil around 456 tonnes of cobalt from cell phones batteries are yearly discarded; • Five routes (scenarios) for recycling cobalt from Lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) were developed in the laboratory; • Environmental assessments of the developed routes were carried out using LCA; • The presented routes have lower environmental impacts than the reference scenario to the primary production of cobalt from mining.