The dismantling of the spent alkaline zinc manganese dioxide batteries and the recovery of the zinc from the anodic material

The existing plants for the recovery of exhausted alkaline zinc manganese dioxide batteries adopt an initial heat treatment and then a grinding. The last operation intermixtures the components of the batteries and consequently the successive recovery process proves to be rather complicate and needs a large scale plant. An initial dismantling and separation of the anodic, cathodic and packing components allow a successively easier recovery process and a small scale plant. This possibility has been assumed in this work and a simple recovery process has been proposed for the anodic material, consisting of an initial leaching step to separate and recover the unconverted metallic zinc and a successive step of cathodic deposition to recover the converted ionic zinc. A highly efficient zinc recovery has been obtained at the cathodic deposition step by adopting a heat treatment of the anodic material before its leaching process.