EARTH

[2901-14-02] Waste Lithium-Ion Battery Recycling in JX Nippon Mining & Metals Corporation

○Yasufumi Haga¹, Kazuhiro Hatano¹, Katsumi Saito¹ (1. JX Nippon Mining & Metals Corporation)

Chairman：Toshihiro Kamegai （JX Nippon Mining & Metals Corporation）, Wei Sheng Chen (National Cheng Kung University)

Keywords:Lithium-ion Battery recycling, zero-emission

The JXTG group is one of major company groups in Japan and the group integrates businesses over energy, resource and material fields. The JX Nippon Mining & Metals Corporation is a member company of the JXTG group and engages in copper mining, copper smelting & refining, electronic-materials production and used material recycling. The characteristic of the Nippon Mining & Metals Corporation for its recycling business is applying "Zero Emission Policy" without landfill, with operating a unique metal recovering system consists of pyro and hydrometallurgical processes, and with employing efficient scrap treatment system utilized from its copper smelting technology. In 2010, the Nippon Mining & Metals Corporation constructed a pilot plant for recovering valuable metals from waste lithium ion batteries and its cathode materials. The process employs unique hydrometallurgical technologies. The process consists of leaching, solvent extraction and electro winning to recover electrolytic cobalt and electrolytic nickel as main products, and lithium and manganese carbonate as byproducts. The company has changed its mind to processing mainly the waste batteries because of the difficulty of collecting waste cathode materials. This paper describes the technical changes and developments, and also shows the recent operating conditions of the plant.