Approximately 4 billion alkaline batteries are sold annually in the United States, which amounts to nearly 150,000 tons of alkaline batteries. Alkaline batteries are not considered hazardous materials and are therefore safe to be landfilled; however, nearly $100 million of metals from the spent alkaline batteries are being wasted per year in the United States instead of being recycled (Battery Care and Disposal). Therefore, it would be beneficial to establish a viable alkaline battery recycling process to reuse materials and to reduce the tonnage of alkaline batteries that are landfilled. This problem represents a significant financial opportunity as well as the opportunity for the major alkaline battery manufacturers to reduce their environmental footprint.

Black mass, the powder product of crushing discharged alkaline batteries, consists of a mix of over twelve components and metals. The metals can be recycled, recovered individually, and resold. Currently, a very small percentage of black mass is used as fertilization for crop fields. Not reusing the remaining material wastes millions of dollars of metals per year. In this presentation, we will discuss one method to process and separate this black mass into two particularly useful components, electrolytic manganese dioxide (EMD) and zinc (Zn), which respectively make up the cathode and anode active material in their alkaline batteries – with an overall goal of designing an engineered system that can achieve > 95% purity of ingot zinc and EMD. In this talk, we will outline not only the overall process, but also discuss industrially-relevant parameters including scale and cost.