Abstract
The European Union is moving towards a sustainable, decarbonized, and circular economy. It has identified seven key value chains in which to intervene, with the battery and vehicle value chain being one of them. Thus, actions and strategies for the sustainability of batteries need to be developed. Since Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a strategic tool for evaluating environmental sustainability, this paper investigates its application to two configurations of a sodium–nickel chloride cell (planar and tubular), focusing on the active material and the anode, with the purpose of identifying the configuration characterized by the lowest environmental impacts. The results, based on a “from cradle to gate” approach, showed that the tubular cell performs better for all environmental impact categories measured except for particulate matter, acidification, and resource depletion. With nickel being the main contributor to these impact categories, future sustainable strategies need to be oriented towards the reduction/recovery of this material or the use of nickel coming from a more sustainable supply chain. The original contribution of the paper is twofold: (1) It enriches the number of case studies of LCAs applied to sodium/nickel chloride cells, adding to the few studies on these types of cells that can be found in the existing scientific literature. (2) The results identify the environmental hot spots (cell configuration and materials used) for improving the environmental footprint of batteries made from sodium/nickel chloride cells.
Highlights
The design of products and technologies is at the heart of sustainability, enabling the identification of a product’s configurations and materials characterized by lower environmental impacts
Products with a high potential for supporting the transition towards a more sustainable economy should be identified in order to correctly orient future strategies, priorities, and investments
This paper aims to support the research in this field by examining the environmental aspects of design options for sodium–nickel chloride cells
Summary
The design of products and technologies is at the heart of sustainability, enabling the identification of a product’s configurations and materials characterized by lower environmental impacts. Eco-efficiency and eco-design are central requirements for creating sustainable and circular products, reducing resource and material mass flows per product or service, and dealing with global environmental problems [2]. Products with a high potential for supporting the transition towards a more sustainable economy should be identified in order to correctly orient future strategies, priorities, and investments. The European Commission, in its recent communication on the circular economy, identified batteries and vehicles as one of the seven key value chains for supporting this transition [3]. Actions and strategies need to be defined and adopted to move batteries and vehicles towards sustainable growth models
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