Criticality Assessment of the Life Cycle of Passenger Vehicles Produced in China

Xin Sun, Vanessa Bach (), Matthias Finkbeiner and Jianxin Yang
Additional contact information
Xin Sun: China Automotive Technology and Research Center Co., Ltd
Vanessa Bach: Technische Universität Berlin, Chair of Sustainable Enginnering
Matthias Finkbeiner: Technische Universität Berlin, Chair of Sustainable Enginnering
Jianxin Yang: State Key Laboratory of Urban and Regional Ecology, Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Circular Economy and Sustainability, 2021, vol. 1, issue 1, 435-455

Abstract: Abstract China is globally the largest and a rapidly growing market for electric vehicles. The aim of the paper is to determine challenges related to criticality and environmental impacts of battery electric vehicles and internal combustion engine vehicles, focusing not only on a global but also the Chinese perspective, applying the ESSENZ method, which covers a unique approach to determine criticality aspects as well as integrating life cycle assessment results. Real industry data for vehicles and batteries produced in China was collected. Further, for the criticality assessment, Chinese import patterns are analyzed. The results show that the battery electric vehicle has similar and partly increased environmental impacts compared with the internal combustion engine vehicle. For both, the vehicle cycle contributes to a large proportion in all the environmental impact categories except for global warming. Further, battery electric vehicles show a higher criticality than internal combustion engine vehicles, with tantalum, lithium, and cobalt playing essential roles. In addition, the Chinese-specific results show a lower criticality compared to the global assessment for the considered categories trade barriers and political stability, while again tantalum crude oil and cobalt have high potential supply disruptions. Concluding, battery electric vehicles still face challenges regarding their environmental as well as criticality performance from the whole supply chain both in China and worldwide. One reason is the replacement of the lithium-ion power battery. By enhancing its quality and establishing battery recycling, the impacts of battery electric vehicle would decrease.

Keywords: Criticality; Resources; ESSENZ; Life cycle assessment; Environmental impacts; E-mobility (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s43615-021-00012-5 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:circec:v:1:y:2021:i:1:d:10.1007_s43615-021-00012-5

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.springer.com/journal/43615

DOI: 10.1007/s43615-021-00012-5

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Circular Economy and Sustainability from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().