I have a hard time believing it's cheaper than from my local lithium guy.

Idk where they got the picture from but 4300mah in aa size would be insane. Thats like 2.5 times as much capacity as how much the best ones provide currently.

illini pride:

Enter the new technique from scientists at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. There, a team led by chemical and biomolecular engineering professor Xiao Su, has been spending time disassembling batteries and then submerging them in an organic solvent. This leads to a brine that contains lithium as well as other metals present in the batteries.

To harvest the lithium, the team developed a special electrode created from a copolymer consisting of molecules that attach to lithium and those that respond to an electrical current. When placed inside the brine and electrified, it sucked only lithium from the solution like a sponge, leaving other metals behind.

"A new technique could now make that process economically viable."

That reminds me of that Tumblr post about Aperture Science celebrating pride month.

"Congratulations Earth, your survival just became Economically Viable™ "

📰

That means battery prices will be coming down, right? Right?

Question is does that $12.70/kg figure include sourcing the spent batteries?

Great news, but would be curious to know if the figures are apples to apples, or if one of them excludes cost of the raw material.

If this truly works, that would be fantastic news, but getting clean lithium out of a used battery that has been degraded and the lithium has become contaminated sounds extremely complicated, so I'm still a bit skepical on the feasibility of it.

We can power the country on vape pen lithium.

Not related directly to the article, which I found interesting, but I'd never heard of this website before and there seems to be many great articles on it! Another website to follow for me!

The cost will come down further with scale. The great thing about that is that dead lithium batteries will have value, so people will be much less inclined to throw them in the trash or dump them elsewhere

Marginally lower cost over 500 possible cycles under ideal conditions… this does not take into account other pollutants it may cause or the human element. Still, very positive as a total, as this is a resource a way hitherto untapped (unless you count risky social media innovatives who almost burn up their homes making lithium batteries from vapes and whatnot).

What's more, the researchers say the method is much more affordable than other battery-based lithium-harvesting techniques, costing about US$12.70 per kilogram of lithium recovered.

Indeed, according to Daily Metal Prices, lithium costs $13.17 per kilo on the open market as of the time of writing. So this method actually comes out cheaper than just buying the stuff.

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