International waste battery treatment
Internationally accepted waste battery treatment is roughly three kinds of: curing buried, stored in the waste mine, recycling.
1. Curing buried, stored in the waste mine
Waste batteries are generally transported to a special toxic, hazardous landfill, but this practice is not only too costly and wasteful, because there are still a lot of them can be used as raw materials for the useful substances.
2. Recycling
(1) heat treatment Switzerland has two factories specializing in the processing and use of old batteries, the Barticle company adopted the method of old batteries are ground up and sent to the furnace heating, which can be extracted volatile mercury, higher temperatures when the zinc is also evaporated, which is also a precious metal. Iron and manganese are fused together to make a manganese-iron alloy for steelmaking. The plant can process 2,000 tons of waste batteries a year, obtaining 780 tons of ferromanganese alloy, 400 tons of zinc alloy and 3 tons of mercury. Another plant extracts iron directly from the batteries and sells a mixture of metals such as manganese oxide, zinc oxide, copper oxide and nickel oxide directly as metal scrap. The thermal treatment method is more expensive, however, and Switzerland also mandates a small fee per battery buyer dedicated to the processing of used batteries.
(2) "wet processing" Magdeburg suburbs are building a "wet processing" device, where in addition to lead batteries, all types of batteries are dissolved in sulfuric acid, and then with the help of ionic resins from the solution to extract a variety of metals, in this way The raw materials obtained in this way are purer than those obtained by thermal treatment, so they are sold at a higher price on the market, and 95% of the various substances contained in the batteries can be extracted. Wet treatment eliminates the need for sorting, which is a manual process that increases costs. The Magdeburg unit, which has a processing capacity of 7,500 tons per year, costs slightly more than landfill methods, but valuable raw materials are not discarded and do not pollute the environment.
(3) vacuum heat treatment method Germany Alter developed the vacuum heat treatment method is also cheap, but this first need to sort out the waste battery in the nickel-cadmium batteries, waste batteries heated in a vacuum, in which the mercury quickly evaporated, it can be recycled, and then the remaining raw materials grinding, with magnets to extract metallic iron, and then from the remaining powder to extract nickel and manganese. This processing of a ton of waste batteries cost less than 1500 marks (according to the exchange rate of 4.7148 to calculate, about 7072 yuan)!