Recovery of graphite from spent lithium-ion batteries and its wastewater treatment application: A review

Graphite is currently a key material with huge theoretical capacity and is widely used in lithium-ion battery anodes, but with the emergence of a large number of spent lithium-ion batteries (SLIBs) there will be a huge amount of spent graphite (SG) that need to be recycled urgently. In the field of waste lithium recycling, graphite as a future strategic resource has not received enough attention to a large extent. At the same time, the world is facing a huge shortage of water resources and serious water pollution problems, the recycled spent graphite can be used to treat wastewater for obtaining clean water, which can produce huge environmental and economic benefits. This review discusses the current situation of graphite applications and recycling in SLIBs on the market, followed by an introduction to the mechanism for the capacity degradation of SLIBs. Then, the state-of-art recycling technologies for SLIBs anode graphite are summarized. Moreover, the application of recycled graphite (RG) in wastewater treatment is discussed and summarized. Specially, we focus on the development of graphite recycling and wastewater treatment applications from SLIBs in recent years and propose some suggestions and prospects in this field.