The really important point: "Furthermore, the ni-DESs are highly soluble in water and can be recovered and recycled."
Most leaching processes produce toxic waste, often very large quantities of toxic waste.
It's usually soluble in water, so plants have big leachate ponds, where the water evaporates, leaving behind some kind of sludge. The question here is, can this new leachate really be recycled effectively, or is there a sludge-disposal problem?
This is probably a solveable problem, because recycling batteries starts with a very rich resource. It's processes which extract from low-grade ores that yield giant dumps of leftover crud. Gold and rare earth extraction are notorious for this.
The original mining process almost certainly involved some kind of leachate processing process too. And it’s pretty unlikely to be worse doing it on battery components where all the original components were highly refined.
Most leaching processes produce toxic waste, often very large quantities of toxic waste. It's usually soluble in water, so plants have big leachate ponds, where the water evaporates, leaving behind some kind of sludge. The question here is, can this new leachate really be recycled effectively, or is there a sludge-disposal problem?
This is probably a solveable problem, because recycling batteries starts with a very rich resource. It's processes which extract from low-grade ores that yield giant dumps of leftover crud. Gold and rare earth extraction are notorious for this.