Recycled value-added circular energy materials for new battery application: Recycling strategies, challenges, and sustainability-a comprehensive review

Lithium-ion battery is the key technology to power electronic devices, digital tools, and electric vehicles. As battery-operated technologies are expanding enormously fast, battery raw materials are critical in terms of supply and demand. It is anticipated that battery raw materials preserved in the ores could face a supply crunch in the future. To minimize the future impact, alternative sources of battery raw materials are necessary. Although batteries, photovoltaic and glass sectors contribute to the world economy significantly, they could generate huge amount of underutilised materials at the end-of-life which are often disposed of as wastes or used in low value processes with significant negative economic and environmental impacts. All these wastes contain many high value battery materials, which can be extracted and processed for re-use again and again as economically viable effective raw materials for new battery application in a circular way. Currently, an organized comprehensive review focuses on circular energy materials recovered from waste resources is hardly found. This review takes this opportunity and provides an effective overview on the recovery of circular energy materials from waste resources. Various recycling approaches and challenges of valuable materials recovery from the wastes of lithium-ion battery, photovoltaic, and glass, subsequent purification and nano structuring processes, fabrication of new battery electrodes, and their further application in lithium-ion batteries are thoroughly discussed. This review also provides outlook and considers scientific, economic, environment, and social benefits of the materials recovered from wastes and re-use them in lithium-ion battery technology, and how this affects circular economy.