Resources Circulation through Advanced Powder Processing

Abstract

Society’s interest in building a resource-recycling society, including circular economy, is increasing nowadays in SDGs and carbon net zero era. Although there are various physical, physicochemical, and chemical separation in the powder process technology for resource recycling, all of them must meet the major constraints of energy and resource conservation. To balance the reduction of environmental load such as carbon neutrality with resource recycling, it is necessary to develop various separation technologies that support multiple resource recycling loops in the concept of circular economy. As an example of such an approach, this paper introduces the development of recycling technology for lithium-ion batteries, for which demand is expected to increase exponentially because of carbon neutrality promotion. We introduce examples of the development of recycling technology for the two different recycling loops; one is separation technology for outermost loop of the circular economy concept, and another is the direct-recycling technology of cathode active material particles in the inner layer of the circular economy concept.