A facile chemical route for recovery of high quality zinc oxide nanoparticles from spent alkaline batteries

Recycling of spent domestic batteries has gained a great environmental significance. In the present research, we propose a new and simple technique for the recovery of high-purity zinc oxide nanoparticles from the electrode waste of spent alkaline Zn-MnO2 batteries. The electrode material was collected by the manual dismantling and mixed with 5 M HCl for reaction with a phosphine oxide reagent Cyanex 923 (R) at 250 degrees C for 30 min. The desired ZnO nanoparticles were restored from the Zn-Cyanex 923 complex through an ethanolic precipitation step. The recovered particle product with about 5 nm diameter exhibited fluorescent properties (emission peak at 400 nm) when excited by UV radiation (excitation energy of 300 nm). Thus, the proposed technique offered a simple and efficient route for recovering high purity ZnO nanoparticles from spent alkaline batteries. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.The reported research work was funded through Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), India (Grant No. OMEGA/PSC0202). We are also thankful to the Director, CSIR-CSIO Chandigarh, India. KH Kim also acknowledges the partial support made by a National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MEST), South Korea (No. 2009-0093848)