The use of lithium‐ion batteries ( LIB s) has grown since the market entry of portable power tools and consumer electronic devices. Soon, the need for LIB will rise, when they are used in hybrid and full electric vehicles as well as in energy storage systems to enable the use of renewable energies. To prevent a future shortage of cobalt, nickel, and lithium and to enable a sustainable life cycle of these technologies, new recycling processes for LIBs are needed. These new processes have to regain not only cobalt, nickel, copper, and aluminum from spent battery cells but also a significant share of lithium. Therefore, this article approaches unit operations and their combination to set up for efficient LIB recycling processes, especially considering the task to recover high rates of valuable materials with regard to involved safety issues. Further discussed unit operations are Deactivation/discharging of the battery Disassembly of battery systems (specifically for EV‐battery systems ) Mechanical processes (including inert crushing, sorting, and sieving processes and a special case: thermomechanical separation) Hydrometallurgical processes Pyrometallurgical processes Specific dangers are associated with LIB recycling processes: electrical dangers, chemical dangers, burning reactions, and potential interactions of the single dangers. Furthermore, industrial process chains, already in use, as well as research approaches are summarized. The processes of the companies Retriev Technologies , Recupyl , Batrec , Inmetco , Xstrata , Umicore , Accurec , AEA Technology , OnTo T echnology, and Lion Engineering are discussed and illustrated briefly. A closer look is given to some results of the research project LithoRec .

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The increasing demand of lithium ion batteries (LIBs), especially from growth in electric vehicle (EV) production, presents the need for recovery of active materials from spent lithium ion batteries and production rejects. To prevent a future shortage of lithium and other valuable raw materials, development of recycling processes for both the spent LIBs and the production rejects becomes crucial. In contrast to existing recycling processes, the main goal of the presented process (Fig. 1) is to achieve a high recycling yield and to recover battery materials at battery grade quality. Lithium and electrolyte components should be recycled in addition to copper, cobalt and nickel. The project spams the entire recycling process starting from the discharging and disassembly stages, and following through with mechanical, chemical and thermal processing (e.g. crushing, grinding, classification, sorting, and extraction) used to separate the battery into recyclable fractions. In order to match the high purity standards of hydro-metallurgical processes for the production of battery active materials, the battery active materials have to be separated from the current collector foil very purely (Fig. 2). For this purpose, a new separation process has been developed: Adhesion Neutralization via Incineration and Impact Liberation (ANVIIL). Firstly, a thermal degradation of the polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) binder of the electrodes is induced by heat under different atmospheres. Secondly, a new separation apparatus is used to apply impact stress on the electrode compounds to separate coating from foil and to integrate a fine classification step. Using this separation process separation rates of over 99 % are reached. Furthermore, the separated coating can be re-gained with a very low contamination of aluminum from scraps of the current collector of under 0.1 % w/w. Subsequently, new battery active materials have been produced and characterized in battery test cells.