Real-World Life-Cycle Assessment of Industrial-Scale Lithium-Ion-Battery Hydrometallurgical Recycling

Battery recycling is essential for mitigating the resource and environmental impacts of the electric vehicle industry. However, real-world assessments of battery recycling at the industrial scale remain limited. Here, we present the most comprehensive life-cycle assessment to date using operational data from 46 recycling facilities in China, covering approximately 50% of the global capacity in 2023. We evaluate multiple recycling outputs, black mass, metal salts, precursors, and cathodes and reveal that new hydrometallurgical technologies for direct precursor and cathode recovery could reduce carbon emissions by 61% compared to mining production due to skipping multiple extraction steps. Real-world recycling often requires blending with virgin materials to maintain the targeted Ni-Co-Mn ratio for recycling the nickel-cobalt-manganese (NCM) precursor or cathode due to market preference for high-nickel chemistries. Our results show that, compared with virgin production, fully recycled cathode materials can reduce pack-level carbon footprint levels of lithium-iron phosphate (LFP) batteries by 11% (2-14%), significantly greater than previous estimates, and by 24% (12-27%) for NCM811 batteries. Coupled with dynamic fleet modeling, battery recycling is identified to cumulatively avoid 147-433 million tons of CO₂ emissions in China by 2050. These insights offer important guidance for carbon footprint regulations and the advancement of circular economy practices globally.