Are future recycling benefits misleading? Prospective life cycle assessment of lithium‐ion batteries

Joris Šimaitis, Stephen Allen and Christopher Vagg

Journal of Industrial Ecology, 2023, vol. 27, issue 5, 1291-1303

Abstract: Life cycle assessment (LCA) quantifies the whole‐life environmental impacts of products and is essential for helping policymakers and manufacturers transition toward sustainable practices. However, typical LCA estimates future recycling benefits as if it happens today. For long‐lived products such as lithium‐ion batteries, this may be misleading since there is a considerable time gap between production and recycling. To explore this temporal mismatch problem, we apply future electricity scenarios from an integrated assessment model—IMAGE—using “premise” in Brightway2 to conduct a prospective LCA (pLCA) on the global warming potential of six battery chemistries and four recycling routes. We find that by 2050, electricity decarbonization under an RCP2.6 scenario mitigates production impacts by 57%, so to reach zero‐carbon batteries it is important to decarbonize upstream heat, fuels, and direct emissions. For the best battery recycling case, data for 2020 gives a net recycling benefit of −22 kg CO2e kWh−1 which reduces the net impact of production and recycling from 71 to 49 kg CO2e kWh−1. However, for recycling in 2040 with decarbonized electricity, net recycling benefits would be nearly 75% lower (−6 kg CO2e kWh−1), giving a net impact of 65 kg CO2e kWh−1. This is because materials recycled in the future substitute lower‐impact processes due to expected electricity decarbonization. Hence, more focus should be placed on mitigating production impacts today instead of relying on future recycling. These findings demonstrate the importance of pLCA in tackling problems such as temporal mismatch that are difficult to capture in typical LCA.

Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/jiec.13413

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:inecol:v:27:y:2023:i:5:p:1291-1303

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=1088-1980

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Industrial Ecology is currently edited by Reid Lifset

More articles in Journal of Industrial Ecology from Yale University
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().