This site may earn chapter commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use.

We all know in that location are a lot of batteries piled up around the globe, which could cause major issues for the surroundings and put pressure level on the sorts of underdeveloped areas that tend to host these battery landfills. But there's some other problem: waste material of the battery materials themselves. The whole premise of the mod liquid battery is to use metal ions as the energy carrier — and apparently, lithium is the current king of the battery world. Now, a team from the American Chemical Society says they've developed a way to extract some of the precious metals from discarded batteries past using a trio of naturally occurring fungal species.

Fungi have an interesting property: Many species are surprisingly good at dealing with exposure to heavy metals. This has been observed for some fourth dimension, and it's ane of the main reasons that fungi are used all over lodge to extract metals from things like industrial fly ash, or runoff from processing plants. If you pick your species right, fungi tin can be abundant and quick to replicate, inexpensive to purchase and go on alive, and best of all they tend to exist rugged, and so don't require much in the way of care.

fungal battery recycling 2

Aspergillus niger (top left), Penicillium simplicissimum (top correct) and Penicillium chrysogenum (lesser). Credit: Aldo Lobos

Now, logically plenty, this arroyo is coming to battery recycling. The difference betwixt this and historical efforts is that about industrial processes produce a lot of metallic in relatively few individual places — big spigots of metallic-laced water, decommissioned large pieces of machinery, or enormous piles of industrial waste. With lithium ion batteries, the bounty is split betwixt hundreds of millions of devices that need to be nerveless and processed. But with lithium, cobalt, and other expensive battery materials needed in such large quantities, it volition increasingly make sense to look for companies to look at old batteries to replenish their stocks.

The technique requires that the batteries exist opened upwards and the cathodes (made of lithium and cobalt in the form of LiCoO2) be pulverized before exposure to the fungi, a cocktail of Aspergillus niger, Penicillium simplicissimum and Penicillium chrysogenum, which have been used to excerpt metals in other contexts for some time. They produce organic acids including oxalic acid and citric acid, and these acids can extract up to 85 percent of the lithium and up to 48 per centum of the cobalt from the cathodes of spent batteries. Other of the fungal products, however, similar gluconic acid, were ineffective.

tire-recyclingThe "extraction" refers to leaching the metals into the acidic slurry created past the fungi; from there, the metals notwithstanding need to be reacted extracted for after use — but precipitating free metal ions out of water is one thing industry has gotten very good at over the years.

The fungal arroyo is also under consideration for recycling of the precious metals in more general electronics scrap material, though information technology faces similar challenges to do with centralizing and preprocessing the chip before metals can be extracted. In that case, it's not the bulk silicon that presents a cost barrier, but the much more exotic rare earth metals that can often be extracted from so-called "east-waste" and put to employ once again — easing not merely the expense, but also the man cost of extracting these natural resources.