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Lead acid batteries have been widely used in different fields, so abundant waste lead acid battery was generated. Waste lead acid battery is regarded as a toxic material due to the metallic lead and the lead paste compounds. Once lead and its compounds enter the human body and the environment, which will cause serious threats. At present, the waste lead acid batteries are mainly recovered in the form of metal lead, which has many problems. Thus, this paper put forward a novel technology to recycle waste lead acid battery. Vacuum thermal decomposition was employed to treat recycled lead carbonate from waste lead acid battery. Thermodynamics analysis and experiments were finished from the reaction free energy of lead carbonate decomposition and vacuum furnace. The results showed that the recycled lead carbonate began to be decomposed when the temperature reached 250 °C. Above 340 °C, most of intermediate PbCO3·2PbO were converted to red α-PbO and then transformed to yellow β-PbO when the temperature was raised further to 460 °C. Furthermore, the study provided the fundamental data for the preparation of α-PbO and β-PbO in vacuum, which also demonstrated a new way for the reuse of spent lead acid battery resource and an outlook of sustainable production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lead-acid batteries contain significant amount of lead that is an important material for emerging perovskite solar cells. Here, we successfully recovered lead from lead-acid battery. Anode and cathode lead mud reacted with acetic acid (CH 3 COOH), and the produced high purity lead acetate (Pb(Ac) 2) was tested with FTIR and XRD. The simple synthetic path is efficient and causes no secondary pollution. Furthermore, the recovered lead acetate was used to fabricate normal planar heterojunction perovskite solar cells (PerSCs) with a power conversation efficiency reaching 17.83%. In addition to lead acetate, CH 3 COOH was also found in the product of cathode mud. CH 3 COOH is beneficial for a compact and crystalline perovskite film and improves the device performance. Fabrication of perovskite solar cells with lead from spent batteries reduces the environmental impact of battery waste and promotes the development of new energy technology. Image 1 • We developed a simple approach to synthesize without secondary pollution lead acetate (Pb(Ac) 2) from lead-acid batteries. • Pb(Ac) 2 derived from spend batteries was used to fabricate solar cells with a power conversion efficiency reaching 17.83%. • CH 3 COOH was found to result in perovskite films with larger crystals and less holes and improve performance of solar cells. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]