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To address the issue of excess carbon emissions, China has outlined peaking the carbon emissions and achieving neutrality of carbon goals. New energy storage devices thus have been popularly developed in the past decade. Lithium‐ion batteries(LIBs) have emerged as the most prevalent devices in our daily routines. In the coming decades a huge amount of LIBs will be retired. Spent LIBs are endowed with valuable metal elements that are potentially recyclable. This paper is intended to review the recent studies on the recovery of lithium(Li) and cobalt(Co) from spent LiCoO2 batteries. This paper pays much attention to the hydrometallurgical, pyrometallurgical approaches to recycle lithium and cobalt from spent LIBs including leaching, reducing, and extracting by various inorganic or organic agents in hydrometallurgical methods and different kinds of reductants in pyrometallurgical methods. Last but not least, electrochemical methods, mechanochemistry and biometallurgy are focused for reviewing emerging, low‐cost, environmentally friendly methods. Hopefully, this review can inspire to further studies on recycling lithium and cobalt from spent LiCoO2 LIBs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recovery of critical metals from spent lithium‐ion batteries (LIBs) is important to sustainable development and environment protection. In this paper, sec‐octylphenoxyacetic acid (CA‐12) was first used to recover valuable metals in LIBs. The effects of phase modifier, initial feed pH, extraction kinetics and thermodynamics, CA‐12 concentration and saponification degree were studied and optimized. Under the optimal conditions, 99 % of nickel, cobalt and manganese were co‐extracted to the organic phase, and the loss of lithium was 7 %. The extracted metal ions could be stripped with 0.04 mol/L HCl equivalently. In the spent LIBs powder leaching experiment, leaching efficiencies of all components were greater than 95 %. In the impurity removal stage, extractant N902 was used to remove copper, while iron and aluminum were eliminated by hydrolysis. After two‐stage extraction, the total extraction efficiencies of nickel, cobalt and manganese reached 99.7 %, 99.4 %, 98.45 %, respectively. Finally, lithium in the raffinate was precipitated by saturated Na2CO3, the purity of recovered Li2CO3 was up to 97.7 %. After 5 times cycles, CA‐12 still maintained excellent extraction capacity, showing its potential application prospects for recovering critical metals form spent LIBs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transition‐Metal chalcogenides have high Li‐ion storage capacity and considerable cycle performance, which has attracted great interest from researchers and is expected to replace graphite materials in the field of Li ion batteries. The purpose of this paper is to find a low‐cost and ecofriendly method for producing copper‐based chalcogenides as anodes with a high capacity and long cycling stability for lithium ion batteries. In our strategy, carbon nanospheres are used as templates to prepare precursor Cu(OH)2@C. Then, the Cu(OH)2@C is converted into copper‐based chalcogenides by different routes. The structure and morphology of the as‐synthesized materials is characterized by the X‐ray diffraction, scanning electron microscopy and transmission electron microscopy. The anode electrochemical performance of the samples was investigated by galvanostatic cycling (GC) vs. Li/Li+ at different current rate. Compared to other copper chalcogenides, the synthesized copper oxide shows better charge/discharge cycle stability and rate performance. Its capacity retention is as high as 128 % at a current density of 0.5 C after 200 cycles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]