A fresh recycling technique tested at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory shows how molten salts could play a decisive role in recovering valuable metals from end‑of‑life lithium‑ion batteries. Researchers worked with two lithium hydroxide‑based salt mixtures that melt at lower temperatures than many industrial molten salts and cope far better with moisture — a practical advantage when dealing with real‑world battery waste. Electricity dissolved the cathode metals into the molten salt, and electrolysis was then used to “plate” the metals onto an electrode. The second technique used a lithium hydroxide–lithium chloride mixture to remove lithium and oxygen from the cathode. “By using molten salts, we’ve developed a method that is not only efficient but also adaptable to the challenges of recycling lithium-ion batteries,” said Timothy Lichtenstein, researcher in Argonne’s Chemical and Fuel Cycle Technologies Division.