Heat-treatment recycling of waste toner and its applications in lithium ion batteries

With the growing demand of print and copy in modern society, the number of abandoned toner cartridges has increased year by year. Unfortunately, the residual toner in abandoned toner cartridges is not all disposed properly and such unreasonable discard is serious damage to the environment and human health. Therefore, it is urgent and necessary to carefully dispose waste toner or even recycle them. In this work, waste toner is dealt with heat treatment (400, 600, and 800 °C) to obtain carbon-coated ferric oxides, which subsequently are investigated on the structures, morphologies, and electrochemical performances as active materials for lithium ion battery. In constant current charge and discharge measurements, the results show that the discharge-specific capacities of heat-treated ferric oxides reach to 966, 1029, and 1021 mAhg⁻¹, respectively, in the first cycle. After 50th cycles, the discharge-specific capacity of the samples can, respectively, remain 288, 349, and 245 mAhg⁻¹ in voltage range of 0.02–1.5 V, under the current density of 40 mAg⁻¹, which demonstrates stable cycling performance and suggests potentiality of recycled waste toner as anode materials for lithium ion batteries.