Recycling of spent lithium–ion battery graphite anodes via a targeted repair scheme

Abstract

When lithium–ion batteries (LIBs) reach the end of their life, a lot of hazardous wastes will be generated. Unfortunately, the recovery of spent graphite (SG) anodes is always neglected despite the rather high production cost of battery–grade graphite. In this work, we for the first time propose a novel targeted repair scheme by systematically characterizing and analyzing the structure and composition of SG. The results show that the repair scheme achieves effective SG repair and the repaired graphite anode displays excellent lithium storage performance, which can be comparable to that of commercial graphite. In addition, the scheme is evaluated to reduce energy consumption by 79 % and harmful pollutant emission by 90 % as compared to previously reported solutions. Obviously, our work provides a feasible solution for the recovery of graphite anodes from spent LIBs by understanding the failure characteristics of graphite anodes.