Universal and efficient extraction of lithium for lithium-ion battery recycling using mechanochemistry.

The increasing lithium-ion battery production calls for profitable and ecologically benign technologies for their recycling. Unfortunately, all used recycling technologies are always associated with large energy consumption and utilization of corrosive reagents, which creates a risk to the environment. Herein we report a highly efficient mechanochemically induced acid-free process for recycling Li from cathode materials of different chemistries such as LiCoO, LiMnO, Li(CoNiMn)O, and LiFePO.