Recycling Waste Batteries: Recovery of Valuable Resources or Reutilization as Functional Materials

Massive spent batteries cause resource waste and environmental pollution. In the last decades, various approaches have been developed for the environmentally friendly recycling of waste batteries, as attractive secondary resources. In the present work, the recent progress in the recycling strategies is reviewed, with emphasis on the recovered products (metals and compounds) with high purity and the reutilization of the waste batteries as functional materials (electrode materials in energy storage devices, catalysts, sorbents, magnetic materials, alloys, etc.). Based on the literature summary, the future challenges are also prospected.