A new study has found that reusing lithium-ion battery materials has a much lower environmental impact than mining the raw material – particularly if it’s done with renewable energy.
The study, published in Nature Communications, found that recycling batteries emits less than half the greenhouse gases associated with mining and roughly a quarter of the energy and water.
Some practices could reduce the impact of recycling even further – such as changing electricity sources, and recycling batteries into mixed-metal products rather than specific battery-grade materials.
“This study tells us that we can design the future of battery recycling to optimise the environmental benefits. We can write the script,” says co-author William Tarpeh, a chemical engineer at Stanford University in the USA.
The researchers compared the footprints of mining battery materials to those of a major battery…
