Scientists discover bacteria that eats battery waste, making toxic disposal safe

https://interestingengineering.com/energy/new-bacteria-offers-path-for-battery-recycling

by Sackim05

2 comments

  1. This article does a terrible job of explaining why bacteria eating iron makes it easier to recycle; the iron or stainless steel is highly recyclable. The article contains a link to an abstract on phys.org that contains the same failure, but the actual paper is quite interesting:

    >The continuous demand for lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) in consumer products and electric vehicles (EVs) has raised concerns about their environmental impact when not disposed of properly. Among the components of a spent LIB, the recovery of heavy metals, such as nickel, manganese, and cobalt, from cathode materials is the most critical. While biohydrometallurgy is a promising method for this recovery, it relies on large quantities of chemicals such as iron sulfate (FeSO4) as the energy source, which can limit its scalability. In this work, we seek to develop a modified biohydrometallurgy process that is less dependent on external chemical fuels

    Basically, the normal procedure for separating a mix of metals is a mix of melting and dissolving in acid and precipitating out of solution, either chemically or electrically. This uses a lot of energy and toxic chemicals; the toxic chemicals can be recycled but this requires energy. Instead; bacteria can do the job. This paper focuses on an improvement to the process, letting the bacterial ecosystem feed on the iron cases instead of another chemical energy source. Worth noting that this reduces the iron to something equivalent to iron ore, which won’t be worth re-smelting unless this process grows to a huge scale. But using a cheap metal as fuel to recover an expensive one without external energy input is may be advantageous, it is a damn good bit of research regardless.

    The whole concept of biohydrometallurgy sounds futuristic, but it is [widely deployed in the mining industry in the last ten years.](https://www.angloamerican.com/futuresmart/stories/our-industry/mining-explained/mining-terms-explained-a-to-z/bioleaching-definition-and-process) and research on the subject is very active. This isn’t sci-fi or a lab curiosity, it is already large scale industrial technology.

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