Batteries for electric mobility: life Cycle assessment and processes for Recycling of raw materials

Abstract

Climate change is pushing to rethink the paradigm of anthropic activities. From a society strongly based on fossil fuels and their exploitation, there are many initiatives that aim at a transition towards sustainable energy sources such as the European Green Deal and the European Taxonomy on sustainable finance that aim to promote sustainability and circular economy. Thanks to technological improvements over the past decade in electric storage systems, one of the initiatives is related to the electrification of road transport. It is precisely in this transition that lithium-ion batteries have found ample space thanks to their energy density, which allows the accumulation of energy in weights and volumes that are no longer prohibitive. Looking at global electric vehicle adoption trends, it is possible to identify an exponential growth in battery demand and consequently in the consumption of raw materials such as lithium, cobalt, manganese and nickel. The extraction of these raw materials has strong environmental and social impacts and the availability of these raw materials is limited. To reduce the environmental impacts related to the extraction of raw materials and the production of lithium-ion batteries and to make supply chains more sustainable and circular, it is possible to think of recycling processes that allow the recovery of materials contained within them. The current state of the art in lithium-ion battery recycling technology involves two types of metallurgical processes: pyrometallurgy and hydrometallurgy. The former involves the use of heat to alloy the metals of interest while the latter involves the use of organic/inorganic acids for the selective extraction of those

metals. This Ph.D. thesis is one of the first available works on the topic that aims to assess the techno- economic and environmental sustainability of those lithium batteries recycling processes considering

different chemistries, plant scales and an Italian scenario. [edited by Author]