The production of lithium-ion batteries requires materials such as cobalt, graphite, lithium, manganese and nickel, with China controlling most of the resources and European countries having limited mining capacity for these raw materials. As a result, Europe’s lack of security of supply for key raw materials, such as lithium and cobalt, for the production of LIBs, and the environmental and social impacts of the mining of these raw materials has led to an ambitious update of the European battery legislation by the EU. To incentivize recycling of lithium-ion batteries, the updated EU Battery Directive 2023/1542 not only targets critical raw materials with increasing material recycling quotas but also sets standards for recycled material content in the production of new lithium-ion batteries. The recycling processes required to meet these revised recycling targets currently use only mono-batches of single, individual cathode active materials (CAM). However, there is currently no label for the cathode active material of each individual LIB cell and sorting is only applied for individual battery types, such as LIB, Lead and Alkali Manganese. Further sorting by CAM is currently not applied.

Consumer electronics include computers, communication devices and power tools. While power tools consist mainly of cylindrical 18650 cells, cell phones, laptops and tablets use pouch cells mainly for geometric reasons. Due to the thin pouch shell, elemental analysis using X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectroscopy may be possible [1](Petzold, Flamme 2024). In this study, 97 (main test) + 15 (pre-test) used consumer LIB pouch cells from phones, laptops and tablets were randomly selected from a local battery sorting facility. In addition to LIBs from companies such as Apple, Samsung, Lenovo, many other brands were selected to represent the full range of the market. In total 112 pouch cells have been analyzed with XRF spectroscopy, 45 with ICP-OES. Out of the 45 ICP-OES CAM categorizations, 9 have been categorized as high-cobalt NMC cells and 36 as LCO cells. The first tests with XRF spectroscopy and ICP-OES measurements of spent consumer LIB pouch cells show potential to identify non-LCO CAM. The sorting can reduce contaminants of nickel and manganese in LCO CAM by 60 %. After the second material characterization with ICP-OES, the sorting via XRF spectroscopy was optimized from 50 % up to 83.33 %.