Battery Breakthrough: Mining Batteries, in a Microwave

Microwave-based method to upcycle old lithium-ion cathodes

Instead of letting old lithium-ion batteries pile up as waste, Sandia National Laboratories researchers have developed a microwave-based process to recover and remake their cathodes, potentially turning spent batteries into a new domestic source of critical materials.

Lithium-ion batteries power everything from phones and electric vehicles to grid-scale energy storage and earbuds, but their cathodes — the part of batteries denoted by a plus sign — are expensive to make and rely on minerals sourced from a limited number of countries, including lithium and cobalt. The Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example, is responsible for mining about 70% of the world’s cobalt.

Sandia’s new method does more than recycle those cathodes: It upcycles them, transforming spent battery material into new cathodes that better match current industry needs while using less time and being more affordable than conventional high-temperature approaches.

“Cobalt is a critical material for almost all consumer electronics,” said Clare Davis-Wheeler Chin, a Sandia nanomaterials chemist and an inventor of the method. “Since there’s only one main source of cobalt, it would be very easy for the cobalt supply chain to just disappear. We’re about to have an abundance of old