Natural solution for rechargeable battery recycling

No matter how many times you can recharge them, battery sources for smartphones, cars and tablets still have a finite lifespan and many will end up in landfills. Researchers in the United States may have come up with a unique solution, which utilises naturally occurring fungi to extract cobalt and lithium from batteries.

The researchers have presented their findings at the 252nd National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS). Research team leader Jeffrey A Cunningham said the idea came from a student who had experience in extracting some metals from waste slag left over from melting operations.

“We were watching the huge growth in smartphones and all the other products with rechargeable batteries, so we shifted our focus. The demand for lithium is rising rapidly, and it is not sustainable to keep mining new lithium resources,” Cunningham said.

Although a global problem, the US leads the way as the largest generator of electronic waste. It is unclear how many electronic products are recycled. Most likely, many head to a landfill to slowly break down in the environment or go to an incinerator to be burned, generating potentially toxic air emissions.

While other methods exist to separate lithium, cobalt and other metals, they require high temperatures and harsh chemicals. Cunningham’s team is developing an environmentally safe way to do this with organisms found in nature — fungi in this case — and putting them in an environment where they can do their work.

“Fungi are a very cheap source of labour,” Cunningham said.

To drive the process, Cunningham and Valerie Harwood, PhD, both at the University of South Florida, are using three strains of fungi — Aspergillus niger, Penicillium simplicissimum and Penicillium chrysogenum.

“We selected these strains of fungi because they have been observed to be effective at extracting metals from other types of waste products,” Cunningham said.

“We reasoned that the extraction mechanisms should be similar and, if they are, these fungi could probably work to extract lithium and cobalt from spent batteries,” he said.

The team first dismantles the batteries and pulverises the cathodes. Then, they expose the remaining pulp to the fungus.

“Fungi naturally generate organic acids, and the acids work to leach out the metals.

“Through the interaction of the fungus, acid and pulverised cathode, we can extract the valuable cobalt and lithium. We are aiming to recover nearly all of the original material,” he said.

Results so far show that using oxalic acid and citric acid, two of the organic acids generated by the fungi, up to 85% of the lithium and up to 48% of the cobalt from the cathodes of spent batteries were extracted. Gluconic acid, however, was not effective for extracting either metal.

The cobalt and lithium remain in a liquid acidic medium after fungal exposure and Cunningham’s focus now is on how to get the two elements out of that liquid.

“We have ideas about how to remove cobalt and lithium from the acid but, at this point, they remain ideas.

“However, figuring out the initial extraction with fungi was a big step forward,” he said.

Other researchers are also using fungi to extract metals from electronic scrap, but Cunningham believes his team is the only one studying fungal bioleaching for spent rechargeable batteries.

Cunningham, Harwood and graduate student Aldo Lobos are now exploring different fungal strains, the acids they produce and the acids’ efficiencies at extracting metals in different environments.