Uncovering various paths for environmentally recycling lithium iron phosphate batteries through life cycle assessment

In recent years, the rapid development of global new energy vehicle industry has brought severe challenges to the waste management of retired power batteries. How to minimise the environmental impact in the recovery process has become a common and emergent concern. In this study, Life Cycle Assessment Model (LCA) was applied to analyse the entire life cycle of Lithium Iron Phosphate (LFP) batteries from the production, use, and recovery processes and compared the life cycle environmental impacts of different recovery technologies to determine the technology with the optimum overall environmental attributes. The critical process for reducing environmental impacts and the main contributing factors were identified by thoroughly evaluating the environmental impact of the recovery process and the reduction of the environmental impact in the production phase by using recycled products. The results show that the cascade utilisation technique has the optimum performance compared with the all-component physical method and hydrometallurgical recovery technology. The results also imply that the production phase has a relatively greater impact on the assessment results when the recovery phase is not considered, especially the use phase has no contribution to the ADP, while the production phase has a contribution of 97.8%. Through the comprehensive comparison of different recovery technologies for lithium iron phosphate batteries, it is found that the environmental impact of the recovery phase can be improved by prioritising cascade utilisation, increasing the recovery rate, reducing the resource and energy consumption and pollution discharge in the recovery process, increasing the variety of recycled battery materials, and choosing the recycled products that can substitute for more production steps.

Automated summary

The rapid development of the global new energy vehicle industry has brought challenges to the waste management of retired power batteries. A Life Cycle Assessment Model (LCA) was used to analyze the environmental impacts of different recovery technologies for Lithium Iron Phosphate (LFP) batteries. The results show that cascade utilization has the best overall environmental attributes compared to other recovery methods.