Review of recent progress on lithium recovery and recycling from primary and secondary sources with membrane-based technologies

Lithium is one of the strategic chemical elements that is of significant interest to the world industry. Growing demand is forcing researchers to look for new effective ways to extract it, both from traditional sources (brines, minerals, spent lithium-ion batteries (LIBs), etc.) and reserves. The review mainly presents information on the effectiveness of commercial filtration and ion-exchange membranes that are of interest for lithium recovery, based on tests using as feed solutions of complex mixtures, natural solutions, leachate solutions of rocks, as well as spent LIBs. A comparison is made of the methods of selective electrodialysis with monovalent-ion-permselective membranes, electrodialysis with conventional ion-exchange membranes and bipolar electrodialysis, nanofiltration, capacitive deionization and membrane capacitive deionization, electrolysis and electrobaromembrane separation, and some others. In contrast to other review articles in this field, the efficiency of lithium extraction, recovery and recycling by different methods is compared by assessing the same parameters: competing ions fluxes through the membrane and selective ion separation coefficient. It has been shown that membrane methods can provide high selectivity and performance for the extraction of lithium, both from solutions with multivalent cations (as Ca2+ and Mg2+; Co2+, Ni2+ and Mn2+) and from solutions containing monovalent cations (Na+ and K+).