Recovery of Manganese and Cobalt from Discarded Batteries of Toys

Abstract

Compared to other electronic goods, life span of children’s toys is very less, which resulted in the generation of huge amount of batteries and environmental pollution. Initially, the batteries are discharged, dismantled, crushed, and physically beneficiated to get black powder, metallic fraction, and plastics. Further, the black powder of batteries was processed for systematic leaching studies and found that 95.6% Mn and 86.05% Co were leached in 2 mol/L H2SO4 at 30 °C in 120 min using 10% H2O2 (v/v) as an oxidant, maintaining the pulp density 75 g/L. From the leach liquor, at pH 5–8 and above 12, the oxides of Co and Mn were obtained, respectively. The developed process has potential to be transferred in an industry after scale-up studies.