Lithium-ion battery recycling is becoming essential infrastructure for electrification, yet most comparisons of recycling routes still center on metal recovery, cost, and emissions. Our new article in Green Chemistry argues that this misses where much of a spent cell’s value actually resides: not only in its elemental composition, but in the multiscale structural order retained through service — crystal frameworks, particle morphology, conductive networks, and interphases.
The article reframes recycling around a single question — how much functional order survives the route — and builds three linked ideas on it:
- Order retention: the organizing metric. A recycling operation is either an order filter that preserves separability and manufacturable value, or an entropy amplifier that increases phase entanglement and downstream purification burden.
- Reset-level taxonomy: recycling pathways sit on a continuum from shallow repair and cathode-to-cathode regeneration to deep chemical or elemental reconstruction, graded by the extent of irreversible structural and chemical reset.
- Repair window: the conditions under which degradation stays bounded enough for direct regeneration to remain viable, before disorder accumulates and forces more destructive reprocessing.
Framed this way, order retention becomes a green-chemistry design metric: shallow-reset routes that stay within the repair window curtail reagent, energy, water, and fluorinated-emission burdens, whereas deeper resets trade robustness for environmental cost.
Read the paper
Eeamtak S., Tamwattana O., Kasemchainan J., Pornprasertsuk R., Noerochim L., Watanabe T., Weng J., Mohamad A.A., Zhang Y., Kheawhom S. Beyond Metal Recovery in Lithium-Ion Battery Recycling: Order Retention as a Sustainability Framework from Pack Disassembly to Interphase Chemistry. Green Chemistry (2026), Advance Article. DOI 10.1039/D6GC03171D