Waste Liquid-Crystal Display Glass-Directed Fabrication of Silicon Particles for Lithium-Ion Battery Anodes

The rapid increase of waste liquid-crystal display (LCD) is becoming a serious problem. Among the constituents of waste LCD panels, glass substrates are not completely recycled and buried in landfills because of the lack of recycling technologies. In order to establish a recycling strategy with sustainable process and application, we fabricated silicon (Si) materials into lithium-ion battery (LIB) anodes through the magnesiothermic reduction of waste LCD glasses. To synthesize high-quality Si materials, an optimized pretreatment process is proposed to remove undesirable contents from waste LCD glasses. In order to achieve high areal capacity for practical applications, we conducted facile and cost-effective electrode maturation, which improves the cohesion and adhesion of the Si anodes. The electrochemical measurement results showed that the waste LCD glass-derived Si electrodes exhibited high areal and gravimetric capacities of 6.3 mA h cm–2 and 3438 mA h g–1, respectively, in the initial cycle. The electrodes maintained a high areal capacity of 3.1 mA h cm–2 during the 100th cycle. This reduced Si materials and electrode-manufacturing process can be a cost-effective and sustainable recycling technology for waste LCD glass management and anode materials for LIBs.