Study: Recycled Lithium Batteries as Good as Newly Mined Cathodes made with novel direct-recycling beat commercial materials
Excerpt: “In general, people’s impression is that recycled material is not as good as virgin material,” says Yan Wang, a professor of mechanical engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. “Battery companies still hesitate to use recycled material in their batteries.”
A new study by Wang and a team including researchers from the US Advanced Battery Consortium (USABC), and battery company A123 Systems, shows that battery and carmakers needn’t worry. The results, published in the journal Joule, shows that batteries with recycled cathodes can be as good as, or even better than those using new state-of-the-art materials.