Treating Pollutants with Waste: Upcycling Spent Lithium-ion Battery Black Mass into Functional Materials for Water Purification

The large-scale decommissioning of lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) production is progressing rapidly, and the demand for environmentally friendly recycling and material recovery is rising. Collectively, this review has presented a series of studies on recent progress in using waste LIB black mass to synthesize various materials for water treatment, including synthesis methods, material structure and application performance of derived adsorbents, Fenton catalysts, persulfate-activating catalysts, etc. The above are based on rational material design and processing to create high-efficiency, multi-functional water treatment materials from black mass. Anode graphite-based adsorbents are a typical representative type with good heavy metal adsorption performance, and cathode-derived catalysts show fast degradation of organic pollutants via oxidative pathways. This review briefly introduces the shortcomings of the current state and provides some directions for further research to promote the construction of an effective pollution treatment model in the circular economy era.