Hydrometallurgical treatment of exhausted alkaline batteries

On a resource management level, batteries could be considered as an ore of secondary raw materials, because of their high content in useful metals, such as zinc and manganese; moreover, disposal of spent batteries constituted a serious environmental problem in terms of heavy metals content, when these devices are disposed off in inadequate way. Main processes applying for treatment of the batteries are the pyrometallurgical processes, that involve high energetic consumption and pollution problems, and hydrometallurgical processes, chipper and at low energetic cost. The experimental activity of the present work involve the utilisation of technology well know in the framework of the mineral processing and the metal dissolution by hydrometallurgical processes for Mn-Zn recovery from wastes, constituted by spent alkaline batteries. The results have demonstrated the technical feasibility of the application of the mentioned technologies; in fact, high recovery of manganese and zinc dissolved in solution were achieved (over 90%).