A sustainable route: from wasted alkaline manganese batteries to high-performance cathode for aqueous zinc ion batteries

The recycling complexity of spent alkaline zinc-manganese dry batteries contributes to environmental pollution and suboptimal resource utilization, highlighting the urgent need for the development of streamlined and efficient recycling strategies. Here, we propose to apply the regenerated cathode material of waste alkaline zinc-manganese batteries to aqueous zinc ion batteries (AZIBs), which can be directly recycled selectively in one step by a simple calcination method. The regenerated α-MnO₂ presents a regular nanowire shape with oxygen defects, applied as a cathode for the AZIBs; it can provide a specific capacity of 173.4 mAh g⁻¹ even after 2000 cycles. This simple recycling strategy for the positive electrodes of spent alkaline zinc-manganese batteries not only reduces the complexity of the recycling process of spent alkaline batteries, but also achieves the purpose of high-value recycling, significantly reducing environmental pollution and resource waste.