| dc.description.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] | it_IT |
