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Potential Leaching of Heavy Metals from Pristine and Accelerated Weathered Slag from Recycling of Automobile Lead-Acid Batteries

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Abstract

Recycling of automotive lead-acid batteries generates large qualities of potentially toxic slag. The current study investigated heavy metal leaching and partitioning in spent lead-acid battery slag (LaBS) as a function of pH, liquid/solid (L/S) ratio, and pore volume. LaBS was highly alkaline (pH: 12.22) and contained high total concentrations (mg/kg) of Pb (101,300), Cu (2508), Cr (1238), Zn (589), Cd (515) and Ni (110), indicating poor metal recovery in the recycling processes. pH-dependent leaching results showed that maximum leaching of Pb, Cu, Cr, Zn, Cd and Ni occurred under acidic conditions (pH 2–6), but dropped under neutral and alkaline conditions (pH 7–13) due to precipitation as insoluble compounds. Heavy metal leaching at high L/S (5–10) was significantly higher (p < 0.05) than those at low L/S ratios (0.5–2.0), suggesting that the greatest risk of release of these heavy metals occurs in the long-term following disposal into the environment. Heavy metal breakthrough curves exhibited washout behaviour of highly soluble fractions, generally characterized by an initial rapid release of heavy metals within the first pore volumes, followed by a drop in concentration. Accelerated weathering of LaBS significantly reduced heavy metal leaching in both batch and column experiments except in very few cases. Heavy metal partitioning showed that total cumulative leaching in column experiments was very low, accounting for just 0.1–7.7%, while 92.3–99.9% occurred as the residual fraction. Despite high total concentrations of heavy metals in LaBS, the risk of heavy metal leaching under neutral-to-alkaline conditions or natural pH of the LaBS was very low, but could be high if the material is exposed to acidic conditions.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the technical staff from the Department of Soil Science and Agricultural Engineering, University of Zimbabwe for providing laboratory assistance. Left-over laboratory reagents were partly provided by a biochar research project funded by the Swedish International Foundation for Science (IFS) Grant Number C/5266-2 awarded to WG, to which we are very grateful. Authors are solely responsible for research design, implementation and decision to publish the manuscript, and IFS played no role in the research process and decision to publish the manuscript. We thank the three anonymous reviewers for the comments that greatly improved our work.

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  1. Biosystems and Environmental Engineering Research Group, Department of Soil Science and Agricultural Engineering, University of Zimbabwe, P.O. Box MP167, Mt. Pleasant, Harare, Zimbabwe

    Willis Gwenzi & Greyson T Kosta

  2. Nanotechnology and Water Sustainability Research Unit, College of Science, Engineering and Technology, University of South Africa, Johannesburg, South Africa

    Nhamo Chaukura

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  1. Willis Gwenzi
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WG originated the idea, revised and finalized the manuscript; GTK designed the experiment, collected experimental data, and compiled the initial draft manuscript as part of his BSc Honours dissertation. All authors contributed to experimental design, data analysis and interpretation, and manuscript compilation.

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Correspondence to Willis Gwenzi.

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Gwenzi, W., Kosta, G.T. & Chaukura, N. Potential Leaching of Heavy Metals from Pristine and Accelerated Weathered Slag from Recycling of Automobile Lead-Acid Batteries. Environ. Process. 5, 611–629 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40710-018-0320-9

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