Battery Recycling-Driven Material Looping for Sustainability: Opportunities and Challenges

Conspectus: The rapid adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) and the expansion of grid-scale energy storage applications have driven unprecedented demand for lithium-ion batteries (LIBs), bringing the recycling and sustainable management of spent LIBs to the forefront of public and scientific attention. Given the environmental risks and resource wastage associated with discarded batteries, advancing recycling technologies is crucial to achieving a circular economy and fostering sustainable development. Despite this urgency, current recycling practices remain limited by outdated, fragmented, and energy-intensive technologies that fail to meet the growing demands of scalability, selectivity, and sustainability.In this Account, we highlight the vital role of innovative recycling strategies in realizing sustainable materials management and summarize our efforts in this area. We categorize recycling technologies into four evolving stages: open-loop recycling, closed-loop recycling, direct recycling, and upcycling. A mechanistic analysis is conducted to elucidate how each strategy facilitates material recovery and regeneration. Special attention is given to how new recycling systems enhance the reaction rates, selectivity, and controllability by modulating thermodynamics and kinetics, leveraging cavitation effects, optimizing charge transfer, tailoring functional groups and bond energy, and reducing ion migration barriers. Through representative case studies from our work, we illustrate how these technologies progressively evolve from basic environmental compliance to enabling a robust circular economy. Finally, we outline the key challenges and future directions for the field, underscoring the importance of intelligent recycling frameworks and integration of sustainable design principles into next-generation battery systems.