A sustainable approach to cathode delamination using a green solvent.

Designing an environment-friendly delamination process for an end-of-life (EoL) composite cathode is a crucial step in direct cathode recycling. In this study, the green solvent dimethyl isosorbide (DMI) is explored to extract cathode active materials (AMs) from the Al current collector dissolving the polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) binder. Mechanistic insight suggests that binder removal from the Al substrate proceeds reducing polymer interchain interaction through DMI penetrating into the PVDF crystalline region.