The increasing electrification of our world drives a demand for energy storage solutions, especially for electric vehicles. As they reach their end of life, recycling them becomes vital to recover the critical raw materials in these batteries. However, traditional recycling route
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The increasing electrification of our world drives a demand for energy storage solutions, especially for electric vehicles. As they reach their end of life, recycling them becomes vital to recover the critical raw materials in these batteries. However, traditional recycling routes have high energy consumption or require high quantities of chemicals. To mitigate this need and drive more sustainable recycling routes, new methods must be investigated to allow for a green recycling process. In this thesis, the simultaneous leaching of LiNixMnyCozO2 and LiFePO4 was investigated in a mildly acidic solution to extract Li, Ni, Mn, Co, Fe, and PO4 , limiting the use of additional reagents, leaching efficiencies achieved over 90% for Li, Ni, Mn and Co, with significant amounts of impurities also leaching in the solution. Electrochemical purification methods were investigated to remove contaminants such as Fe, Cu, and Al to facilitate purification of the extracted leach solution. This was done by employing an electro-oxidation method on simpler solutions of FeSO4 and industrial LiFePO4 to oxidise the generated Fe2+ after leaching, with more than 99% oxidation achieved. This method was also used on more complex, multimetallic systems, with oxidation percentages reaching 73% in similar conditions. Furthermore, an electrodeposition step was added to mitigate the interference of Cu with the electro-oxidation step, with a moderate effect on improving the efficiency of the Fe2+ oxidation. Moreover, a pH adjustment step was also added to evaluate the influence of the solution acidity on the electrochemical methods, with pH 4 solutions achieving high impurity removal by combining all of the mentioned methods.