Comparative Life Cycle Assessment of Merging Recycling Methods for Spent Lithium Ion Batteries

Abstract

An urgent demand for recycling spent lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) is expected in the forthcoming years due to the rapid growth of electrical vehicles (EV). To address these issues, various technologies such as the pyrometallurgical and hydrometallurgical method, as well as the newly developed in-situ roasting reduction (in-situ RR) method were proposed in recent studies. This article firstly provides a brief review on these emerging approaches. Based on the overview, a life cycle impact of these methods for recovering major component from one functional unit (FU) of 1 t spent EV LIBs was estimated. Our results showed that in-situ RR exhibited the lowest energy consumption and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of 4833 MJ FU−1 and 1525 kg CO2-eq FU−1, respectively, which only accounts for ~23% and ~64% of those for the hydrometallurgical method with citric acid leaching. The H2O2 production in the regeneration phase mainly contributed the overall impact for in-situ RR. The transportation distance for spent EV LIBs created a great hurdle to the reduction of the life cycle impact if the feedstock was transported by a 3.5–7.5 t lorry. We therefore suggest further optimization of the spatial distribution of the recycling facilities and reduction in the utilization of chemicals.

THE CHALLENGES AND ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTIFICATION OF RECYCLING Li-ION ELECTRIC VEHICLES BATTERIES

“…The method of HM-CA has been noted as one of the most energy intensive methods present in the industry, by having an energy consumption of 20,892 MJ per one FU during the whole process, while RR consumed the least amount of energy (4833 MJ per one FU). The RR method has the lowest total rate of GHG emissions (1525 kg CO2-equivalent per one FU), while the HM-CA method exhibited the highest amount of GHGs (2351 kg CO2-equivalent per one FU) among the analyzed methods [11].…”

“…As one of the main components of a battery, the recovering of the lithium cobalt oxide (LCO) is a process that is a big part of the recycling process. Rougly, just over a quarter of LCO can be recovered from a functional unit (FU) of one tone of spent Li-ion battery packs by the UHT, HM-SA, HM-CA, RR-N2 and RR-Vac method (284.2, 275.5, 261.0, 273.0, 274.3 kg, respectively) [11].…”

Powering battery sustainability: a review of the recent progress and evolving challenges in recycling lithium-ion batteries

“…The organic components, such as binder, electrolytes, and separator, are burned off during the smelting process (Wu et al, 2022). Pyrometallurgical recycling can be categorized into three groups: direct roasting (Li et al, 2014), In situ reduction roasting (Zhou et al, 2021), and salt roasting (Makuza et al, 2021;Du et al, 2022;Wu et al, 2022). The direct roast reduces the metal oxide at >1,000 • C with reducing agents.…”

“…The direct roast reduces the metal oxide at >1,000 • C with reducing agents. In situ roasting involves pyrolysis under a vacuum or inert atmosphere without additives, which uses a relatively lower temperature than direct roasting, between 800 and 1,000 • C (Li et al, 2016;Xiao et al, 2017;Zhou et al, 2021). Salt roasting can be operated at even lower temperature <600 • C, and reports have shown higher materials recovery rates (Wang D. et al, 2016;Dang et al, 2018;Fan et al, 2019).…”

Environmental Impacts of Specific Recyclates in European Battery Regulatory-Compliant Lithium-Ion Cell Manufacturing

“…While the technological advantages and disadvantages, as well as the ecological performance of the various recycling routes, have already been demonstrated in many studies [34][35][36][37][38][39], the question of ecological advantage in comparison to primary materials in the context of subsequent fresh battery cell production remains unclear, especially with regard to the amount of recyclates demanded by the EU. For this reason, these ecological effects of recycled materials are to be quantified in this study with the help of life cycle assessment.…”