Realizing Reusability of Biomass Leachate for Closed‐Loop Recycling of Wasted NCM Cathode

Abstract The large‐scale production and End‐of‐Life (EoL) of lithium‐ion batteries (LIBs) call for recycling with economic and environmental efficiency. However, existing hydrometallurgical strategies typically consume huge amounts of corrosive leachate without reusability, especially for recycling materials with multiple types of metallic elements. Herein, the successful realization of the reusability of Rosa roxburghii type biomass leachate is reported during recycling the wasted LI cathode. The key to realizing leachate reusability relies on the co‐precipitation of multiple transition metal elements based on coordination chemistry, which is different from the conventional method where alkali is necessary to neutralize the leachate for precipitating the metallic elements. It is demonstrated that the complete leaching of wasted NCM cathode at room temperature (25 °C) for 1 h, with an activation energy E a = 70.30 kJ mol −1 . Highly efficient recovery is achieved by co‐precipitation using anhydrous oxalic acid (OA) (with efficiencies of 97.21%, 98.78%, and 96.55%, for Ni, Co, and Mn, respectively) without neutralizing the leachate, thus enabling leachate reusability. The structure and electrochemical properties of the regenerated NCM cathode (R‐NCM111) are comparable to those of the commercialized samples. This work is expected to provide a general strategy for achieving the reusability of biomass leachate for the recovery of wasted NCM cathode.