A revolutionary method for recovering cobalt from batteries has been discovered

Electric vehicles have been circulating for a few years and are gradually starting to be seen more and more on the roads.
Most of today's new cars are either 100% electric or are hybrid cars capable of running on battery power up to a certain speed and then switching to fossil fuel power in the case of high performance.
The construction of electric cars is also involving enormous efforts to build efficient and long-lasting batteries.
This has always been the limit of building battery-powered cars.
Problem that today seems solved.
But compared to environmental benefits, such as the reduction of pollution thanks to the reduction of fossil fuels, there is a disadvantage that electric cars are bringing: the extraction of materials such as lithium, cobalt and copper which are used for batteries and which doing so requires great environmental degradation.
For this reason it is necessary to recover these materials as much as possible from old batteries so as not to always have to extract new ones, as in a sort of circular economy.
Scientists are increasingly looking for ways to recover such materials from disused batteries.
Recently research developed by a team from Linnaeus University in Sweden and the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in India seems to have found the solution.
Here's which one.
Using urine to extract cobalt from batteries Scientists have reportedly found a new method to extract cobalt from electric vehicle batteries.
This innovative method was published in the scientific journal ACS Omega.
The method uses a liquid solvent derived from urine and acetic acid, the main ingredient in vinegar.
Scientists said this could recover as much as 97 percent of cobalt from a battery, all while relying on harmless chemicals and far less energy than current processes.
The combination of easily available and harmless substances with high energy efficiency gives this method the effectiveness to work on a large scale.
With this very simple method you will avoid always extracting new cobalt but you will be able to use most of the cobalt contained in the old batteries.
It is unclear where the urine used for the experiment came from.
How long do the batteries of an electric car last As with a mobile phone or a PC, even in electric cars the batteries are subject to degradation and will need to be replaced within a few years.
Generally, the batteries of an electric car should be changed every 8 years given a decline of approximately 10% of their capacity following approximately 500 charging cycles.
However, it is a much superior performance compared to other electronic devices for which the battery life ranges from 2 to 3 years.
However, replacing the batteries of an electric vehicle is expensive from an economic point of view.
They range from a minimum of €3,000 to an average of around €10,000 for basic electric cars, up to an amount of even €40,000 for the most high-performance and luxurious models.
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