A new study from Stanford University found that recycling lithium-ion batteries can significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, energy consumption, and water usage.
Researchers used life cycle analysis to learn that recycling lithium-ion batteries to recover critical metals has a substantially positive environmental impact compared to mining virgin metals.
The article published in Nature Communications identified that recycling lithium-ion batteries is more sustainable when producing industry-scale battery-grade cathode materials from end-of-life batteries than sourcing from the conventional mining supply chain.
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By comparing conventional battery manufacturing with mining and processing new chemicals with the recycling battery process, the researchers found that recycling lithium-ion batteries emits 57.7 to 80.9 percent fewer greenhouse gases, uses 72.2 to 87.7 percent less water, and uses 77 to 89.4 percent less energy. In addition, recycling batteries produces fewer air pollutants, like soot and sulfur.
Recycling can extract key elements required to make new batteries, such as lithium, nickel, cobalt, copper, manganese, and aluminum, by sourcing defective scrap batteries from manufacturers and “dead” batteries from workplaces.
However, to make the recycling efforts effective, processing facilities’ locations must come from cleaner energy, like hydropower, geothermal, and solar, as well as an abundance of freshwater supply to maximize the environmental impact.