Sulfates: Worse for batteries than they are for hair!

Many of us fret about sulfates in shampoo and sulfites in wine, but I just learned about the awful effect of employing sulfates in battery cathode production.

Apparently, the way most lithium-ion cathodes have been made for 30 years results in a colossal amount of waste. Fortunately, I learned about this problem while discovering a potential solution.

The cathode is a battery's positive electrode, where charging energy is applied. In most of today's lithium-ion batteries, these are made of lithium-nickel manganese-cobalt (NMC). The way these have been made involves mining the metals, turning them into metal sulfates or salts, converting lithium carbonate to lithium hydroxide, then transporting these materials to the cathode manufacturer where they're mixed in water. A caustic material like sodium hydroxide gets added to precipitate out a powder precursor that gets mixed with the lithium hydroxide and baked in a furnace to form grains of lithiated cathode material. A special coating is then applied in a separate process.