Financial viability of electric vehicle lithium-ion battery recycling

Economically viable electric vehicle lithium-ion battery recycling is increasingly needed; however routes to profitability are still unclear. We present a comprehensive, holistic techno-economic model as a framework to directly compare recycling locations and processes, providing a key tool for recycling cost optimization in an international battery recycling economy. We show that recycling can be economically viable, with cost/profit ranging from (−21.43 - +21.91) $·kWh(−1) but strongly depends on transport distances, wages, pack design and recycling method. Comparing commercial battery packs, the Tesla Model S emerges as the most profitable, having low disassembly costs and high revenues for its cobalt. In-country recycling is suggested, to lower emissions and transportation costs and secure the materials supply chain. Our model thus enables identification of strategies for recycling profitability

Life cycle assessment of lithium‐ion battery recycling using pyrometallurgical technologies

Industrial Ecolog

A qualitative assessment of lithium ion battery recycling processes

With the widespread adoption of e-mobility, there are high numbers of lithium Ion batteries (LIB) entering the waste stream. It is imperative that disposal and recycling strategies are developed and implemented. There is an urgent need for safe, environmentally friendly and economically affordable disposal routes for End of Life (EoL) LIBs. This study has looked at 44 commercial recyclers and assessed their recycling and reclamation processes. A novel qualitative assessment matrix termed “Strategic materials Weighting And Value Evaluation" (SWAVE) is proposed and used to compare the strategic importance and value of various materials in EoL LIBs. The sustainability and quality of recycled material are assessed by comparing the final form or composition after the recycling processes, the industrial processes and the industry type (primary sector, manufacturer or recycler). SWAVE is applied to each company, producing a score out of 20, with a higher number indicating that more materials can be recycled. The separation processes and resources from six of the prominent recycling companies are discussed further. The majority of recyclers use one or more of mechanical treatment, pyrometallurgy, or hydrometallurgy, concentrating upon high value metal extraction rather than closed-loop recycling of the metals or component materials, highlighting an environmental and technological gap. To improve the current circular economy of batteries reuse and repurposing of materials (closed-loop recycling), instead of purely recycling or recovery of metals should be considered for further development. Further studies of environmental trade-offs from recycling or recovering one material in preference to another is required

LAYERS: a decision-support tool to illustrate and assess the supply and value chain for the energy transition

Climate change mitigation strategies are developed at international, national, and local authority levels. Technological solutions such as renewable energies (RE) and electric vehicles (EV) have geographically widespread knock-on effects on raw materials. In this paper, a decision-support and data-visualization tool named “LAYERS” is presented, which applies a material flow analysis to illustrate the complex connections along supply chains for carbon technologies. A case study focuses on cobalt for lithium-ion batteries (LIB) required for EVs. It relates real business data from mining and manufacturing to actual EV registrations in the UK to visualize the intended and unintended consequences of the demand for cobalt. LAYERS integrates a geographic information systems (GIS) architecture, database scheme, and whole series of stored procedures and functions. By means of a 3D visualization based on GIS, LAYERS conveys a clear understanding of the location of raw materials (from reserves, to mining, refining, manufacturing, and use) across the globe. This highlights to decision makers the often hidden but far-reaching geo-political implications of the growing demands for a range of raw materials that are needed to meet long-term carbon-reduction targets

Energy Consumption, Carbon Emissions and Global Warming Potential of Wolfberry Production in Jingtai Oasis, Gansu Province, China

During the last decade, China's agro-food production has increased rapidly and been accompanied by the challenge of increasing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and other environmental pollutants from fertilizers, pesticides, and intensive energy use. Understanding the energy use and environmental impacts of crop production will help identify environmentally damaging hotspots of agro-production, allowing environmental impacts to be assessed and crop management strategies optimized. Conventional farming has been widely employed in wolfberry (Lycium barbarum) cultivation in China, which is an important cash tree crop not only for the rural economy but also from an ecological standpoint. Energy use and global warming potential (GWP) were investigated in a wolfberry production system in the Yellow River irrigated Jingtai region of Gansu. In total, 52 household farms were randomly selected to conduct the investigation using questionnaires. Total energy input and output were 321,800.73 and 166,888.80 MJ ha−1, respectively, in the production system. The highest share of energy inputs was found to be electricity consumption for lifting irrigation water, accounting for 68.52%, followed by chemical fertilizer application (11.37%). Energy use efficiency was 0.52 when considering both fruit and pruned wood. Nonrenewable energy use (88.52%) was far larger than the renewable energy input. The share of GWP of different inputs were 64.52% electricity, 27.72% nitrogen (N) fertilizer, 5.07% phosphate, 2.32% diesel, and 0.37% potassium, respectively. The highest share was related to electricity consumption for irrigation, followed by N fertilizer use. Total GWP in the wolfberry planting system was 26,018.64 kg CO2 eq ha−1 and the share of CO2, N2O, and CH4 were 99.47%, 0.48%, and negligible respectively with CO2 being dominant. Pathways for reducing energy use and GHG emission mitigation include: conversion to low carbon farming to establish a sustainable and cleaner production system with options of raising water use efficiency by adopting a seasonal gradient water pricing system and advanced irrigation techniques; reducing synthetic fertilizer use; and policy support: smallholder farmland transfer (concentration) for scale production, credit (small- and low-interest credit) and tax breaks

Prospective life cycle assessment to avoid unintended consequences of net-zero solutions and its challenges

Climate change has led to specific carbon reduction targets including net-zero ones that are set to help in mitigating climate change by governments and organizations. This is not only to mitigate but also to meet the growing demands of the global population, while ensuring practical progress and implementation. In line with those targets, alternative low-carbon energy technologies as well as those that capture carbon from the atmosphere are being hailed as practical solutions. For example, the UK government has set the ambitious plan of reaching net zero by 2050 which requires renewable energy, nuclear, hydrogen and other low carbon fuels to be accelerated significantly, while increasing the share of carbon capture and storage (Rt Hon Chris Skidmore, 2022). These require innovation beyond existing technologies, i.e. developing emerging technologies. Although there is an optimistic view on the use of emerging technologies- as they may reduce energy use and subsequently CO2 emissions across different sectors-, such technologies require different materials than established technologies, which can introduce different types of emissions up and down the supply chain. Such burdens should be carefully studied from raw material requirement to the life cycle environmental impacts in order to avoid unintended consequences of the technologies in the future (Melin et al., 2021). Therefore, from the early stage of technology development prospective life cycle assessment (pLCA) should be employed to assess environmental impacts of emerging technologies (Bergerson et al., 2020). However, since the knowledge and information on the emerging technologies are limited and scattered, major challenges exist when performing pLCA, e.g. consistency in modelling foreground systems, data availability, uncertainty (Thonemann et al., 2020; van der Giesen et al., 2020). Here, we demonstrate some additional challenges by exploring emerging technologies for organizations using an example of a defence setting. The focus of this study is not on the war-related operations, but rather looking into the decarbonizing the Defence estates and infrastructure systems -that are used by the military- using some emerging technologies such as Hydrogen, Carbon Capture, Geothermal, Electric Vehicles, and Solar Photovoltaics. Most of the literature studies on pLCA focus on a single emerging technology development and its plausible sustainability impacts in the future. However, for government and organizations to achieve net zero targets, they usually need to implement array of emerging low-carbon energy technologies, some of which need to be employed in parallel e.g. emerging low-carbon energy generation and energy storage systems. This adds further complications and challenges to the pLCA as economics, environment and variability related issues. Firstly, different emerging technologies have different temporal horizons in reaching the commercial maturity and respected market and technology readiness level. Second, such assessments are complicated as finding the most optimal combination of different emerging technologies needs balancing pros and cons of different technologies in terms of different sustainability impacts which makes the problem a kind of multi-criteria problem that involves large number of variables (Torkayesh et al., 2022). Third, large deployment of emerging technologies would also imply some consequences on the marginal markets and that needs further considerations. Therefore, it is of great importance to assess emerging technologies on wider economic scales and consider potential market share of them. Finally, there are some technology and market interventions that also needs to be considered. All these challenges need proper remedies and further research when performing pLCA

Data supporting the comparative life cycle assessment of different municipal solid waste management scenarios

Environmental assessment of municipal solid waste (MSW) management scenarios would help to select eco-friendly scenarios. In this study, the inventory data in support of life cycle assessment of different MSW are presented. The scenarios were defined as: anaerobic digestion (AD, Sc-0), landfilling combined with composting (Sc-1), incineration (Sc-2), incineration combined with composting (Sc-3), and AD combined with incineration (Sc-4). The current article contains flowcharts of the different scenarios. Additionally, six supplementary files including inventory data on the different scenarios, data on the different damage assessment categories, normalization, and single scores are presented (Supplementary files 1–6). The analysis of the different scenarios revealed that the most eco-friendly scenario to be implemented in the future would be the combination of AD and incineration (Sc-4)