Car battery recycling market gears up for future boom
Researcher Anna Vanderbruggen peers into a vat of dark bubbling liquid, the result of a process she has developed to recover graphite from old lithium-ion batteries.. "Battery manufacturers were not interested" in recycled graphite up to now because "they could get it at low cost in China", Vanderbruggen told AFP. Her method, developed at the Helmholtz Research Institute in Freiberg, Germany, involves extracting graphite from "black mass", a powder that also contains cobalt, nickel, lithium and manganese.