Battery Recycling and Black Mass

Under $1,000 of equipment turns an old EV battery into black mass

Atitebi, O.S., Dumre, K., & Jones, E.C., Jr. (2025). Supporting a lithium circular economy via reverse logistics: Improving the preprocessing stage of the lithium-ion battery recycling supply chain. Energies, 18, 651. https://doi.org/10.3390/en18030651

With a $40 shredder, a $98 electric grain mill and a sieve, the team turned an old Nissan Leaf battery into usable black mass.

• After sieving, electric grinding gave 26.1 g of fine black mass per 50 g sample on average, against 19.7 g for hand grinding, a statistically significant difference (p = 0.0016).
• About 54% of the electrically ground material passed the 100-micrometer sieve, compared with about 44% for hand grinding.
• The whole setup (a paper shredder, a hand-crank pulverizer, a grain mill and a sieve roll) cost about $800, orders of magnitude less than commercial equipment.
• Electrically ground black mass had visibly finer particles under the microscope and almost no separator film, which should make the later chemical recovery of lithium easier.

• PaperRead the paper (open access)

Making black mass locally could cut battery recycling costs by 42%

Atitebi, O.S., & Jones, E.C., Jr. (2025). Centralized vs. decentralized black-mass production: A comparative analysis of lithium reverse logistics supply chain networks. Logistics, 9(3), 97. https://doi.org/10.3390/logistics9030097

Grinding spent batteries into black mass at local collection centers, instead of shipping them whole, cut a modeled U.S. recycling network's cost by 42%.

• Over 2021–2040, the decentralized network's total cost was about $82.4 billion, against $141.9 billion for the traditional centralized network, a 42% reduction.
• Moving whole batteries to black-mass plants cost $59.6 billion in the centralized model, and the decentralized design removes that step entirely.
• Because it needs many small facilities, the decentralized network costs about 7% more to build ($1.82 billion vs. $1.70 billion), which is small next to the freight savings.
• Emissions were similar, about 20.7 versus 21.2 million tonnes of CO2-equivalent, because both networks process the same amount of material.

• PaperRead the paper (open access)

Planning the experiments that pull metals back out of black mass

Atitebi, O.S., Dumre, K., Shelor, C.P., & Jones, E.C., Jr. (2026). Experimental design for optimized recovery of critical minerals from lithium-ion battery black mass: Bridging sustainability and process efficiency. Proceedings of the IISE Annual Conference & Expo 2026.

A designed experiment, three factors at three levels, guides chemical leaching trials on black mass made with the lab's low-cost grinding process.

A framework for getting the most value out of used batteries

Jones, E.C., Jr. (2026). 3R-BET: Remanufacturing, repurposing, and recycling battery and energy technologies. Proceedings of the IISE Annual Conference & Expo 2026.

Before a battery is recycled for its metals, it may be repaired, repurposed or remanufactured: a staged testbed for doing that economically.

• Proposes a research framework and testbed for recovering value from end-of-life batteries and energy technologies, in five stages: collection, disassembly and characterization; repurposing; recovering intermediate materials; remanufacturing with them; and raw-material recovery.
• Orders the options from most to least value kept: repair and refurbishment first, then repurposing, remanufacturing and, last, recycling.
• Places each stage in the wider supply chain to show where value can be added, and where the risks lie.
• The lab has applied the framework to used electric-vehicle battery packs, taking material through collection, disassembly, characterization, repurposing and recycling.

Turning recycled battery graphite into 3D-printing powder

Yang, E., Atitebi, O.S., Shelor, C.P., & Jones, E.C., Jr. (2026). Upcycling graphite from spent Li-ion batteries into graphite–Nylon 12 composite for powder bed fusion additive manufacturing. Proceedings of the IISE Annual Conference & Expo 2026.

Graphite recovered from spent lithium-ion batteries has particles in the right size range to fill nylon powders for powder bed fusion printing.

• Compared commercial graphite powder with graphite-rich black mass recovered from spent lithium-ion batteries, by particle shape and size.
• The black mass has a broader spread of particle sizes and more clumping than commercial graphite, but after delithiation its particle sizes fall in the same practical range.
• In Nylon 12 powders made with commercial graphite, more graphite meant more surface coverage and more clumping, and wet mixing spread the graphite more evenly than dry mixing.
• All the composite powders stayed in a size range suitable for spreading in powder bed fusion, giving a baseline for replacing commercial graphite with recycled graphite next.