Louise Horsfall recognised in Royal Society of Chemistry Prize

Professor Louise Horsfall and her team have been recognised as part of a ground-breaking project to recycle electric vehicle batteries, in the Royal Society of Chemistry’s 2024 Awards.

The multi-institutional ReLiB project won the Environment, Sustainability and Energy Horizon Prize for pioneering low-cost, environmentally friendly strategies for recycling electric vehicle batteries.

The ReLiB: Reuse and Recycling of Lithium-Ion Batteries project, has influenced research and policy worldwide, promoting new ways to approach the growing challenge of recycling electronic waste.

As governments worldwide look to limit the use of fossil fuels, the numbers of electric vehicles are growing quickly. Over time this will lead to a rapid rise in lithium-ion battery waste.

Professor Louise Horsfall

The ReLiB project, which was established in 2018, is focused on making the recycling process highly efficient and reducing the number of steps needed, with the aim of preventing long-term environmental issues and waste build-up.

The £18m Faraday Institution-funded project is a multidisciplinary collaboration between the universities of Edinburgh, Leicester, Newcastle, Oxford and Imperial College, led by the University of Birmingham.

Recovering valuable metals

Professor Louise Horsfall, Chair of Sustainable Biotechnology, and her team, including Dr Virginia Echavarri-Bravo and Giovanni Maddalena, engineered bacteria to recover valuable metals from spent lithium-ion batteries.

There are currently no methods to recycle these large batteries, that maintains the intrinsic value of the metals.

But after 2030 the UK will have to ensure that new batteries include recycled metals to continue to sell into the European market.

As part of the ReLiB project, Louise’s research group developed a bioseparation process to extract metals from battery leachate – a metal solution obtained during the battery recycling process.

Working with Edinburgh Genome Foundry Louise’s group analysed engineered strains of different bacteria to identify which could selectively recover valuable metals in the form of nanoparticles. Once recovered, these valuable metals - including cobalt, manganese and nickel – are precursors for making new rechargeable vehicle batteries.

Scale Up

The group conducted scale-up work with FlexBio, an Industrial Biotechnology Innovation Centre (IBioIC) bioprocessing scale up facility at Heriot Watt in Edinburgh.

Larger fermenters, using both synthetic and real battery leachate, were used to refine the process of recovering metal nanoparticles after the bioseparation process.

While the technology is still in the early stages of its development, preliminary life cycle impact assessment suggests it is well over 100 times more sustainable than conventional recycling methods.

About ReLiB

The work by Louise and her team is a vital part of the wider ReLiB project, which is fast-tracking the development of low-cost technologies for separating layers, removing unwanted materials, and reviving usable components – all on an industrial scale.

The ReLiB team have also developed methods to recover and potentially reuse previously unrecyclable components like the polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) binder used in most batteries.

Louise and her team have also received international recognition for their work, winning the grand prize in "Top 10 Global Science and Technology Innovation Awards" at the 2050NOW La Maison’s global trends forum.

About The Royal Society of Chemistry’s Horizon Prize

Royal Society of Chemistry prizes celebrate discoveries and innovations that push the boundaries of science.

Horizon Prizes highlight exciting, contemporary chemical science at the cutting edge of research and innovation.

These prizes are for groups, teams and collaborations of any form or size who are opening up new directions and possibilities in their field, through ground-breaking scientific developments.

 

The development of technologies that can recover battery materials for reuse are absolutely vital. At the moment the technologies do not exist for the lithium-ion battery manufacturing industry to achieve the targets of the EU battery regulations. The recovery and provision of the high-quality metals necessary for new automotive lithium-ion battery production is key to enabling a circular economy for electric vehicles

Professor Louise Horsfall Chair of Sustainable Biotechnology

Collaboration is essential to great science, and groups, teams and collaborations feature heavily in the line-up of winners. The chemical sciences cover a rich and diverse collection of disciplines, from fundamental understanding of materials and the living world to applications in medicine, sustainability, technology and more. By working together across borders and disciplines, chemists are finding solutions to some of the world’s most pressing challenges.

Dr Helen Pain Chief Executive of the Royal Society of Chemistry

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