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

The existing plants for the recovery of exhausted alkaline zinc manganese d ioxide batteries adopt an initial heat treatment and then a grinding The la st 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, c athodic and packing components allow a successively easier recovery process and a small scale plant. This possibility has been assumed in this work an d a simple recovery process has been proposed for the anodic material, cons isting of an initial leaching step to separate and recover the unconverted metallic zinc and a successive step of cathodic deposition to recover the c onverted ionic zinc. A highly efficient zinc recovery has been obtained at the cathodic deposition step by adopting a heat treatment of the anodic mat erial before its leaching process. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All right s reserved.