Abstract
Driven by the global campaign against the dual pressures of environmental pollution and resource exhaustion, the Chinese government has proposed the target of carbon neutrality. On account of this, the increasing number of waste lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) from electric vehicles (EVs) is causing emergent waste-management challenges and it is urgent that we implement an appropriate waste-LIB recycling program, which would bring significant environmental benefits. In order to comprehensively estimate the total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from waste-LIB recycling, the GHG savings also need to be taken into account. Based on the requirements of a carbon-neutral target, this study adopted the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) method to established a mathematical model for measuring the GHG emissions and GHG savings of waste LIBs and a numerical experiment is presented to verify the model. The results were analyzed and are discussed as follows: (1) To achieve carbon neutrality, the resultant GHG emissions and GHG savings are equal, and the corresponding value is 706.45 kg CO2-eq/t. (2) The influence of the ratio of recovery from different collection centers on the net GHG emissions is relatively weak and the ratio of different processing strategies significantly affects the net GHG emissions. (3) There are three directions including recycling technologies, type of batteries, and environmental pollutants, that warrant investigation in the future research.
Highlights
To cope with increasingly serious environmental pollution and climate change issues, the Chinese Government, at a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in 2020, promised to reach the peak of CO2 emissions by 2030 and become carbon-neutral before 2060 [1]
In order to better quantize the environmental benefits of lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) recycling, one ton of waste LIB was set as functional unit and the above data was brought into the formulae in Section 3.2 to obtain the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the recycling process
The life-cycle GHG emissions from the recycling process were compared with the GHG emissions from the virgin manufacturing of the equivalent value of batteries and the virgin production of the equivalent amounts of materials in order to quantize the GHG savings of recycling LIBs
Summary
To cope with increasingly serious environmental pollution and climate change issues, the Chinese Government, at a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in 2020, promised to reach the peak of CO2 emissions by 2030 and become carbon-neutral before 2060 [1]. According to the China Automotive Technology and Research Center, the cumulative number of retired LIBs in China has increased to 200,000 tons (about 25 GWh) in 2020 and is expected to reach 780,000 tons (about 116 GWh) in 2025 [3]. Unrecycled effectively, these waste batteries will bring great environmental pollution, and cause a waste of resources. On the basis of a report of the International Resource Panel, remanufacturing can save 80 to 98 percent of new materials and help reduce GHG emissions in some industries by 79 to 99 percent, which has great potential to achieve reductions in GHG emissions [5]
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