Chromium, manganese, iron, cobalt, nickel, copper and zinc are elements # 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30. The processes to separate them are currently resource-intensive and expensive. They need to be separated by conventional smelting and refining processes or hydro metallurgical processes, or some combination. These processes need to do a great job of purification for the materials to be battery grade.

Plasma ionization, can it be cheap and scalable?

> Plasma ionization, can it be cheap and scalable?

It doesn't need to be awfully cheap - those elements (except iron) are pretty valuable per kg, so they can pay for a pretty expensive process while still being cheaper than getting new stuff out of the ground.

steel recycling has the same concern.

Sure, you can rip apart a building and say "ooh, thats a nice steel beam - we could reuse that for another building, or cut it into sheets to roll flat into something else"... But it is cheaper and easier just to chuck it into a furnace and melt it down and start from scratch.

This is the correct way of thinking, and is widely applicable to many commonly recycled materials. Wood, aluminum, steel, and some plastics can be efficiently processed in this way.

Battery materials and applications are different. They cannot be cheaply and easily melted down and re-used. The main constituents are all very similar and difficult to separate, and need to be separated extremely well in order to be used in battery applications.

The lithium carbonate extraction is very telling. Lithium is #3 in the periodic table. The remaining elements that we would want to extract occupy every number from #24 through #30. The reason that they are extracting cheap lithium and none of the heavy, expensive elements, is that more process development needs to be done.

In light of the above, creating a facility to grind up batteries does not represent much progress towards the core problem, and is not a particularly large step in the right direction. It would be like making a facility to grind up plastic, without having a process in place to recycle the plastic. It's great, but you need more, much more.

But that's not the same, the above process would be like melting the steel and glass and concrete from the building and hope future chemistry allows us to separate them

Current chemistry allows us to do that just fine. Glass melts at a much lower temperature and is much less dense than steel. Concrete is not as dense as steel, but melts at a much higher temperature. So, if you heat up the whole mixture to steel melting temperatures, the glass and steel will melt and can be poured off, while the concrete will stay solid. Then the molten mixture of steel and glass will naturally separate because the steel part is so much heavier than the glass part and they don't naturally mix all that well.

(Fun fact, glass pane manufacturing is often done by floating the molten glass on a bath of molten metal so that the surface tension will make it flat. AFAIK they don't usually use molten steel as the metal though.)

But if you can pull out the steel beams without all the concrete, melting it will be a lot cheaper.

Imagine grinding up a bridge or tunnel and trying melt all the steel out of the concrete.

That sounds expensive.

It does "sound" expensive, but so does separating out all the steel beams from the concrete of a tunnel. That kind of thing is pretty labor intensive and people cost a lot of money. If you have a big enough grinding machine, it may well be cheaper overall if it only needs a single operator.

I'm not a chemist, but this is something we're already very good at, and have been for quite some time. Silicon oxides occur very commonly in iron ores, and are a major component of slag.

> I think the 'grind it up and use chemistry to extract the valuable bits' is the future of recycling. […] If process chemists can't extract everything, then you plasma-ionize what's left and now you just have plain old elements to deal with.

So high temperature applications which remove strong bonds and create programmable ions can lead to atomic elements?