Recovery Of Critical Raw Materials from Waste Batteries Using Environmentally Friendly Technologies

This international collaborative project involves three different institutes in Italy and in Brazil: University of Brescia (Italy) (UNIBS), University of Sao Paolo (Brazil) (USP) and Federal University of Rio De Janeiro (Brazil) (UFRJ). The project is Co-funded by “Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation”, and “São Paulo Research Foundation” (grants: 2012/51871-9, 2019/11866-5, 2020/00493-0, 2021/14842-0). The main aim of the project is to develop, an environmental friendly, total material recovery method for End of Life Li-ion batteries. To evaluate the environmental impacts and economical performances, a Life Cycle Assessment of the proposed methods and an economical evaluation will also carry out.

During the first year of the project (2022/01 -2022/12), the research team evaluated and experimented pretreatment methods, cathode and anode material recovery and value addition to extracted anode materials. Results and findings of the research will be published in open access journals in coming days. Moreover, missions from research teams in 3 different istitutes were also carried out in order to dissiminates and exchange ideas, knowledge and know hows in the form of seminars. During these missions, project coordinator (UNIBS) Prof. Mentore Vaccari from UNIBS, delivered a series of seminars in USP and UFRJ along with laboratory visits and discussions with partner teams in both institues. Further, Dr. Amilton Barbosa Botelho Junior, a researcher involved in the project from USP delivered a series of seminars for master’s and doctoral student at UNIBS in order to provide knowledge aquired in WEEE recoveries and to involved in experiments carried out in Brescia. Also, Prof. Joao Paulo Bassin from UFRJ, visited Brescia to provide supervision and advisories in his expertise on Bio-leaching of cathode materials which suppose to be carried out in Brescia in near future.