Cost and Environmental Impact Assessment of Lithium-Ion Battery Recycling: Sustainable Solutions for a Circular Economy

The surge in electric vehicle adoption will inevitably lead to rapid growth of end-of-life vehicles and spent lithium-ion batteries (LIBs). Recycling these LIBs is imperative for environmental sustainability and unlocking their economic potential, while ensuring a consistent supply of materials for future battery production. Developing recycling technologies that are both cost-effective and environmentally sustainable is essential for addressing the challenges of managing battery manufacturing scrap and end-of-life lithium-ion batteries. Recycling efforts to recover lithium salts from spent LIBs are still in their early stages, with significant technical and operational obstacles to be overcome. Currently, various methods, such as pyrometallurgical, hydrometallurgical, and direct recycling processes, are being employed and actively advanced by researchers to improve their performance and feasibility. This study investigates the industrial-scale hydrometallurgical and pyrometallurgical processes for recycling lithium from end-of-life LIBs to provide a comprehensive analysis of their cost and environmental impacts. This study aims at establishing a baseline for emerging recycling technologies for lithium by studying the commercial recycling processes and examining their different unit processes with a process-level understanding. By assessing emerging recycling methods in EverBatt, an excel-based cost and environmental impact analysis model for battery recycling process and supply chain, this study identifies critical drivers and barriers to process scale-up, such as economic hurdles, material recovery rates and operational scalability, alongside environmental hotspots like greenhouse gas emissions and energy use.