The increased usage of Lithium ion batteries and dominance in the consumer applications bring out a vast quantity of hazardous spent LIBs into the waste stream. Current recycling industries/technologies have engrossed only to recover the maximum valuable metal sources from the spent LIBs and the ignorance of harmful polyolefins (separators/polymers) in a huge amount would earn environmental hazards and impedes the reuse applications. In this study, for the first time, we have simply recovered the used separator from spent LIBs, cleaned with de‐ionized water and reutilized the separator without any modification for new battery fabrication to emphasize “3R” principles in green chemistry. First, the recovered separator has been examined by characterization techniques including tensile strength, differential scanning calorimetry, ionic conductivity, electrolyte uptake, and interfacial resistance, etc. to validate the suitability for re‐use and compared with a commercial separator of Celgard. The obtained results endorsed to reuse the separator in a half‐cell configuration by employing LiMn₂O₄ as a cathode and Li metal as an anode. The test cell displayed almost equal capacity of ∼123 mAh g⁻¹ at 25 mA g⁻¹ using the recovered separator and achieved better cycling life. These outcomes evidently prove that the recovered separator from spent LIBs would replace the commercial separator for the battery application in the near future that helps to accomplish the complete recycling process of spent LIBs for the industries where the recovery of metals only being effectively recycled.

中文翻译：

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用过的锂离子电池再生聚烯烃隔板的第二生命

锂离子电池使用量的增加以及在消费类应用中的主导地位，将大量有害的废LIB带入废物流。当前的回收行业/技术仅致力于从废旧的LIB中回收最大价值的金属来源，而对有害聚烯烃（分离器/聚合物）的无知会大量危害环境并阻碍再利用。在本研究中，我们第一次只是简单地从用过的LIB中回收使用过的隔板，用去离子水清洗，然后在不进行任何修改的情况下重新利用隔板，以进行新的电池制造，以强调绿色化学中的“ 3R”原理。首先，已通过表征技术检查了回收的隔板，包括拉伸强度，差示扫描量热法，离子电导率，电解质吸收和界面电阻等，以验证其是否可重复使用，并与Celgard的商业隔板进行比较。通过使用LiMn，获得的结果得到认可，可在半电池配置中重复使用隔膜₂ O ₄作为阴极，Li金属作为阳极。使用回收的隔膜，测试电池在25 mA g ^-1下显示出几乎相等的容量，约为123 mAh g ^-1，并具有更好的循环寿命。这些结果显然证明，用过的废旧锂电池回收的隔板将在不久的将来取代用于电池应用的商业隔板，这有助于完成废旧LIB的完整回收过程，以用于仅有效回收金属的行业。