Effect of technological developments for smartphone lithium battery on metal-derived resource depletion and toxicity potentials

Abstract

Smartphone technology development has led to a phenomenal increase in its use worldwide, triggering the development of efficient and safe lithium batteries to support advanced smartphones. Lithium ion batteries have many advantages such as high energy density, long lifetime, small size, low weight, no memory effect, and a slow loss of energy. Since new lithium batteries have been continually developed along with new smartphones, the batteries have high potentials to incur environmental impacts associated with rare, precious, and toxic metals. Thus, this study evaluates and compares metal-derived environmental impact potentials from smartphone lithium batteries taking into account battery model replacements, in order to figure out the environmental effect of battery technology development. The concentrations of metals in the batteries were analyzed to determine whether the batteries would be classified as hazardous waste. Life cycle impact assessment methods are used to evaluate resource depletion, human health toxicity, and eco-toxicity potentials from metals. The results showed that the technological development of the batteries did not contribute to reducing hazardous waste potentials. However, it significantly decreased resource depletion and toxicity potentials because the masses of metals were overall reduced over the battery model replacements. This study can be used to provide environmental information for manufacturers to produce low-impact lithium batteries and for e-waste policy makers to effectively manage and recover hazardous and toxic metals in waste batteries.