Rejuvenating LiNi0.5Co0.2Mn0.3O2 cathode directly from battery scraps

Battery recycling is indispensable for alleviating critical material shortages and enabling sustainable battery applications. However, current methods mostly focus on spent batteries, which not only require sophisticated disassembly and material extraction but also have unknown chemistries and states of health, resulting in high costs and extreme challenges to achieve regeneration. Here, we propose the direct recycling and effective regeneration of air-degraded LiNi0.5Co0.2Mn0.3O2 (NCM523) cathode directly from battery scraps generated during battery manufacturing. The NCM523 shows surface degradation only a few nanometers deep and accordingly can be regenerated without adding Li, achieving restored properties (170 mAh g−1 at 0.1 C, 92.7% retention after 1000 cycles) similar to those of fresh commercial materials. EverBatt analysis shows that scrap recycling has a profit of $1.984 ​kg−1, which is ∼10 times higher than conventional recycling, making it practical and economical to rejuvenate slightly degraded electrode materials for sustainable battery manufacturing.