A team led by Martín Negri, a CONICET researcher at INQUIMAE (CONICET-UBA), is developing a method to recover aluminium, lithium, nickel, cobalt and manganese from used lithium-ion batteries so they can go back into industry.
The batteries are safely discharged and taken apart, and their electrodes and membranes are chemically treated until the metals are dissolved in liquids. Each metal salt is then captured separately by biopolymer capsules, the “smart sponges”, made with cellulose from invasive plants.
The method already works at laboratory scale with mobile phone batteries, and car batteries are the next step. In September the project received the 2026 Franco-Argentine Innovation Award, given by CONICET and the Institut français d’Argentine.
