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According to Science Advance Research, lithium-ion batteries are now manufactured for performance, not recycling or reuse. Electric car batteries can usually last for 5 to 12 years before they lose the energy capacity required to run the vehicle. Currently, there is not much debate about the environment for upgrading battery designs for reuse or recycling.

Research: The Second Life and Recycling: The Energy and Environmental Sustainability Perspectives of High-Performance Lithium Ion Batteries. Photo Credit: asharkyu/Shutterstock.com

With the acceleration of global electric vehicle manufacturing, an inevitable result will be an increase in the number of retired lithium-ion batteries, which are difficult to decompose except for traditional lead-acid car batteries.

Due to the significant expansion of the electric vehicle (EV) field since 2010 and the growing demand for huge energy storage applications, the demand for lithium-ion batteries (LIB) is expected to double by 2025 and quadruple by 2030 .

Therefore, the global demand for the basic elements (including lithium and cobalt) used in LIB is expected to grow at roughly the same rate, causing supply problems. From 2018 to 2030, global demand for lithium and cobalt is expected to increase 10 times, exceeding the current supply.

However, the supply of cobalt may be threatened. Cobalt is mainly produced as a by-product of nickel and copper production. The cobalt production of mineral mining is mainly concentrated in the Congo, while most of the cobalt processing plants are in China.

The LIB life cycle system boundary and secondary life and three EOL alternatives, including hydrometallurgy, pyrometallurgy and direct cathode recycling. Image source: Tao, Y. et al., "Science Progress" 

Through this by-product dependence and spatial distribution knowledge, government actions or socio-political instability in certain regions may undermine the supply of cobalt. One finding is that the chemistry of the battery may affect its overall impact on the environment. Cobalt is a typical battery component that requires a lot of energy to be mined and is harmful to the environment. Nickel can be used instead of cobalt to alleviate these problems.

According to the Waste Framework Directive, the directive divides waste management practices into the most environmentally friendly to the least environmentally friendly, and avoiding the use of key materials is the most effective way to improve the sustainability of LIB.

Due to concerns about the supply and supply chain disruption of cobalt, as well as the resulting price fluctuations and unpredictability, research and commercial interests are shifting to low-cobalt lithium-ion batteries and cobalt-free alternatives.

From the perspective of sustainable waste management, recycling LIB, such as reusing it as an energy storage system (ESS) after a car is used, is listed as the second best way to improve the sustainability of LIB.

Comparison of environmental impacts among different usage scenarios of LFP, LMO/NMC532, NMC622 and NCA LIB. Average the environmental impact of different recycling methods. Red and blue respectively indicate the life cycle environmental impacts related to electric vehicle usage scenarios and cascade usage scenarios. The darker the color, the lower the energy density of the battery pack. For all 18 impact categories, LFP LIB is defined as a standardized reference. Image source: Tao, Y. et al., "Science Progress"

Demolition, energy production, material production, incineration, waste sludge treatment, combustion, and energy and material recovery are all part of the LIB scrapping process. The EOL technologies studied have different ways of recycling materials and energy.

More specifically, hydrometallurgical recycling uses water-based chemical properties to recover metals, usually requires leaching, precipitation and solvent extraction; direct cathode recovery directly recovers cathode active products through electrolyte extraction, and pyrometallurgical reprocessing is the most mature LIB recovery Method, through a three-stage smelting process to recover alloy-shaped metal.

Adding a second life greatly reduces the environmental consequences, while the reduction in other impact categories varies greatly. The freshwater ecotoxicity, marine toxicity, freshwater eutrophication, metal depletion, human toxicity, specific substance production and terrestrial acidification of the four lithium-ion batteries have been reduced by an average of more than 30%.

The significant reduction may be attributed to the three-fold difference in life cycle power delivery between the two usage scenarios and the relatively low contribution of energy to these impact categories.

The study also found that if the battery of an electric car can be reused before being discarded, its overall environmental cost can be reduced by up to 17%. Power plants that store solar and wind energy are an option for battery reuse.

This energy storage method is becoming more and more popular because it may use old batteries with lower energy capacity. As the percentage of renewable energy that contributes to the power system rises, the carbon impact of recycled batteries is reduced by about a quarter. Most recycling plants today have difficulty disassembling fully protected car batteries and extracting the basic components.

Carbon footprint hot spots of LFP, LMO/NMC532, NMC622 and NCA LIB recovered by hydrometallurgy. The surrounding sunburst chart represents the result of carbon footprint stratification from life cycle stage to process level. The inner circle represents the upper stage, and the outer circle represents the lower process of each stage. The colors of the stages and their corresponding processes are the same, and the value of each process and stage is proportional to the angle of the concentric circles. In addition, starting from the top, the carbon footprint share of each stage decreases in a clockwise order; at each stage, the carbon footprint share of the lower-level processes decreases in the same way. Image source: Tao, Y. et al., "Science Progress"

As far as natural land use changes are concerned, the beneficial environmental consequences of energy and material recovery may be attributed to land changes resulting from the recovery of metals from mining sites. Carbon footprint and CED are two key indicators for assessing the possibility of climate change mitigation and energy efficiency, incorporating second life and recycling into the battery life cycle.

Depending on the battery chemistry and recycling process, increasing the secondary life can reduce the carbon footprint by 8% to 17% and reduce the CED by 2% to 6%.

When the recycling process and usage scenarios remain the same, the increase in the nickel content and the decrease in the cobalt content of LIB tends to reduce the carbon footprint and CED of its product life cycle, because less materials and energy are required for manufacturing and recycling.

Tao, Y., etc. (2021). The second life and recycling: the energy and environmental sustainability perspectives of high-performance lithium-ion batteries. Scientific progress. Published online: November 5, 2021. Volume 7, Number 45. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abi7633

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Akhlaqul is passionate about engineering, renewable energy, science and business development.

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