Design of an endpoint indicator for mineral resource supply risks in life cycle sustainability assessment: The case of Li‐ion batteries

Abstract

Concerns have risen in recent years about the accessibility of raw materials considered "critical" for technological advancements. The GeoPolRisk indicator was designed as a midpoint indicator in life cycle sustainability assessment to measure geopolitical supply risk with the aim to incorporate raw material criticality as a complement to environmental life cycle assessment (LCA). A recent review of supply risk methods conducted within the Task Force on mineral resources of the Life Cycle Initiative hosted by UN Environment Programme highlighted the opportunity to extend the methodology to an endpoint level. We address this opportunity by presenting GeoPolEndpoint, an indicator that measures the socio-economic damage of the use of mineral resources linked to the area of protection "Natural Resources" in LCA. We build upon previous efforts by introducing price elasticity considerations and modeling potential effects of supply disruptions on commodity markets in the form of a welfare loss and a loss of consumer surplus. The socio-economic damage occurs as geopolitically driven increased costs for raw materials. We test our method on aluminum, cobalt, nickel, and copper, materials relevant for lithium-ion batteries. Results show that nickel and cobalt dominate the contribution to socio-economic damages because of their price and supply risk; we estimate the impact of the use of the four analyzed materials as a potential increased cost ranging from 0.30 to 1.86 USD/kWh depending on the technology and year. We build the steps to assess how the use of certain raw materials could have a substantial economic impact when developing technologies, possibly identifying the shifting of burden due to certain materials not usually deemed important from an environmental perspective. This article met the requirements for a gold-gold JIE data openness badge described at http://jie.click/badges.

The Commodity Life Cycle Costing Indicator. An Economic Measure of Natural Resource Use in the Life Cycle

“…Such percentages decline sharply if the end-of-life is considered and become comparable with those of LFP batteries, although still significantly higher than those of LMO and Zebra batteries. These results are in line with those of Santillán-Saldivar et al [30], who find that, for Li-Ion batteries, nickel and cobalt are the commodities most relevant in terms of socio-economic damages because of their price and supply risks, in absence of recycling. It must be highlighted the fact that the two batteries characterized by the lowest values of the Raw Materials C-LCC indicator-LMO and Zebra-are also characterized by relatively high values of the ReCiPe Mineral Resource Depletion indicator, meaning that they use large amounts of raw materials which extraction today might jeopardize extraction tomorrow.…”

“…An alternative version of the C-LCC indicator, restricted to the European Commission's list of critical raw materials, was developed and applied to batteries for stationary storage. The results are compared with those of Santillán-Saldivar et al [30], who are amongst the first to acknowledge the need of an endpoint indicator to measure geopolitical supply risk and to complement the conventional environmental LCA with an indicator of raw material criticality. The authors develop an indicator, called GeoPolEndpoint (based, in turn, on the GeoPolRisk indicator of Gemechu et al [22]), to measure the socio-economic damage of the use of mineral resources.…”

Copper trade risk in China: A multidimensional dynamic evaluation

“…Eskinder D. Gemechu proposes new geopolitical calculations that expand the scope of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) research to resources 16 . Jair Santillán‐Saldivar further introduces price elasticity considerations, simulates the potential impact of supply disruptions on commodity markets, and studies Li‐ion batteries as an example 17 . Zeng Xianlai 18–20 researched the sustainability of critical metals and e‐waste management.…”

“…16 Jair Santillán-Saldivar further introduces price elasticity considerations, simulates the potential impact of supply disruptions on commodity markets, and studies Li-ion batteries as an example. 17 Zeng Xianlai [18][19][20] researched the sustainability of critical metals and e-waste management. The authors proposed a methodology for assessing a nation's metal criticality using the environment as its primary metric.…”

Measuring raw-material criticality of product systems through an economic product importance indicator: a case study of battery-electric vehicles

“…multi-aspect and multi-perspective, endeavour that considers a multitude of geological, geo-, macro-and techno-economic as well as political and even social issues and dynamics of raw-material supply and demand, thereby paying particular attention to actual or potential causes and effects of situations, where demand cannot (sufficiently) be met. This topic is generally referred to as 'criticality of raw materials', or just 'criticality' (Dewulf et al 2016;Erdmann and Graedel 2011;Graedel and Reck 2016;Graedel et al 2015b;Jin et al 2016;Northey et al 2018;Schrijvers et al 2020), and therefore efforts within LC(S)A development aiming at the life cycle assessment of raw-material usage are currently also dealing with the evaluation of raw-material criticality as well as with its integration into, or complementation to, LC(S)A methodology (Drielsma et al 2016b;Koch et al 2019;Mancini et al 2018;Santillán-Saldivar et al 2020;Sonnemann et al 2015).…”