As the world moves towards a cleaner energy future, the importance of recycling ‘dead’ batteries cannot be overstated. With the growing demand for electric vehicles, portable electronics, and renewable energy storage, lithium has become a critical mineral. According to new research from Edith Cowan University (ECU), tapping into used batteries as a secondary source of lithium not only helps reduce environmental impact but also secures access to this valuable resource, supporting a circular economy and ensuring long-term sustainability in the energy sector.

The global lithium-ion battery market size is projected to expand at a compound annual growth rate of 13 per cent, reaching $87.5 billion by 2027. However, only around 20 per cent of a lithium-ion battery’s capacity is used before the battery is no longer fit for use in electric vehicles, meaning those batteries ending up in storage or on the landfill retain nearly 80 per cent of their lithium capacity.

The Australian Department of Industry, Science and Resources has estimated that by 2035, Australia could be generating 137,000 t of lithium battery waste annually. For the end-of-life batteries, the obvious answer is recycling, said first author Mr Asad Ali, quoting figures from the government which estimates that the recycling industry could be worth between $603 million and $3.1 billion annually in just over a decade.

“By recycling these batteries, you can access not only the remaining lithium – which already purified to near 99 per cent – but you can also retrieve the nickel and the cobalt from these batteries,” Mr Ali noted.

While the lithium retrieved through the recycling process is unlikely to impact the lithium extraction or downstream sectors, the recycling process offered significant environmental benefits when compared with the mining industry. Recycling processes can significantly reduce the extensive use of land, soil contamination, ecological footprint, water footprint, carbon footprint, and harmful chemical release into the environment.

Mining emits up to 37% tons of CO2 per ton of lithium. Recycling processes produce up to 61 per cent less carbon emissions compared with mining and uses 83 per cent less energy and 79 per cent less water as compared to mining.

ECU lecturer and corresponding author Dr Muhammad Azhar said that while Australia holds one of the largest hard rock lithium reserves in the world, the recovery of lithium from end-of-life batteries could provide socio-economic benefits and fulfils environmental sustainability.

The benefits of lithium-ion battery recycling seem obvious, but there are still some challenges to be addressed. The rate of innovation significantly outstrips policy development, and the chemical make-up of the batteries also continuously evolve, which makes the recycling of these batteries more complicated.

However, there is a definite need for investment into the right infrastructure in order to create this circular economy. Several Australian companies are looking at the best ways to approach this, and ECU is exploring the second life of retired lithium batteries, providing a promising future for a greener tomorrow.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is an extraordinary scientific instrument that accelerates particles close to the speed of light before smashing them together. This process produces tiny maelstroms of particles and energy, which hold secrets about the building blocks of matter. However, these collisions also generate enormous amounts of data and enough radiation to scramble electronic equipment.

Despite this challenge, physicists at CERN have made groundbreaking discoveries, including the Higgs boson, whose exact properties still hold mysteries. To advance research further, engineers from Columbia University have collaborated with their colleagues at CERN and other institutions to design specialized silicon chips that can collect data in one of the harshest environments in particle physics.

These chips are called analog-to-digital converters (ADCs), which capture electrical signals produced by particle collisions inside detectors and translate them into digital data. The Columbia-designed ADC chips have been tested and validated for radiation resistance, ensuring they can withstand the severe conditions at LHC for more than a decade.

The collaboration between physicists and engineers has led to the development of two essential components: the trigger ADC and the data acquisition ADC. The first chip enables the trigger system to filter billions of collisions each second, selecting only the most scientifically promising events to record. The second chip will very precisely digitize selected signals, allowing physicists to explore phenomena like the Higgs boson.

This project showcases the power of direct collaboration between fundamental physicists and engineers, creating opportunities for innovation and scientific discovery. As research at CERN advances, Columbia-designed components will contribute to data acquisition systems that support physicists in analyzing phenomena beyond the current limits of knowledge.

Scientists at Harvard University and the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI have made a groundbreaking discovery that could revolutionize our understanding of quantum materials. By using an ultrafast laser technique, they were able to freeze the quantum motion of these materials, paving the way for new technologies such as lossless electronics and high-capacity batteries.

The researchers, led by Matteo Mitrano from Harvard University, used a copper oxide compound called Sr14Cu24O41, which is nearly one-dimensional in structure. This allowed them to study complex physical phenomena that also show up in higher-dimensional systems.

One way to achieve a long-lived non-equilibrium state is to trap it in an energy well from which it does not have enough energy to escape. However, this technique risks inducing structural phase transitions that change the material’s molecular arrangement. Mitrano and his team wanted to avoid this and instead used an alternative approach, where they precisely engineered laser pulses to break the symmetry of electronic states in the compound.

This allowed charges to quantum tunnel from the chains to the ladders, trapping the system in a new long-lived state for some time. The ultra-bright femtosecond X-ray pulses generated at the SwissFEL facility enabled the researchers to catch these ultrafast electronic processes in action and study their properties.

The use of time-resolved Resonant Inelastic X-ray scattering (tr-RIXS) at the SwissFEL Furka endstation gave unique insight into magnetic, electric, and orbital excitations – and their evolution over time. This capability was key to dissecting the light-induced electronic motion that gave rise to the metastable state.

The findings of this study have broad implications for future technologies, including ultrafast optoelectronic devices and non-volatile information storage, where data is encoded in quantum states created and controlled by light.

This work represents a major step forward in controlling quantum materials far from equilibrium, with potential applications in fields such as quantum communication and photonic computing. The use of tr-RIXS at the SwissFEL Furka endstation has opened new scientific opportunities for users, allowing them to study individual and collective excitations in various materials.