Spatio‐Temporal Life Cycle Assessment of NMC111 Hydrometallurgical Recycling in the US

Annual global EV sales have tripled in the last three years and are expected to reach 30 million by 2030. The growth in electric vehicles will cause an increase in demand for battery materials and large volumes of retired batteries in the future. Recycling helps manage retired batteries, supports the domestic material supply, and alleviates the environmental footprint of virgin materials. Hydrometallurgical processes have become popular recently because of their low energy consumption and high recovery rates. This study uses a cradle-to-gate LCA to assess the environmental impact of conventional and truncated hydrometallurgy recycling in RFCM and SRTV eGRID regions between 2023 and 2030. Conventional hydrometallurgical recycling uses solvent extraction to extract metal sulfates, to be reused in new cathode materials. Novel hydrometallurgical recycling technologies use a truncated approach where metal sulfates are not extracted, and the metals' composition is adjusted to produce new cathode materials directly. The functional units are 1kg of NMC811 cathode material and 1 kg of recycled NMC111. The assessment is done in SimaPro, using TRACI, CED, and BEES+ methods, to assess the global warming potential (GWP), cumulative energy demand (CED), and water consumption, respectively. The analysis results show that truncated hydrometallurgy has a lower GWP (0.47 kg CO 2 -eq/kg NMC111 recycled), CED (18.74 MJ/kg NMC111 recycled), and water consumption (30.31 L/kg NMC111 recycled) than conventional hydrometallurgy (0.96 kg CO 2 -eq/kg NMC111 recycled; 13.92 MJ/kg NMC111 recycled; 34.05 L/kg NMC111 recycled). In addition, the spatio-temporal analysis results show that location and electricity grid decarbonization rate affect the environmental impact of recycling. The GWP is 10% lower in SRTV than RFCM, while CED in SRTV is 9% larger than RFCM. Also, grid decarbonization between 2023 and 2030 can reduce GWP by 13.3%, CED by 4.26%, and water consumption by 17.8%.