Recycling routes of lithium-ion batteries: A critical review of the development status, the process performance, and life-cycle environmental impacts

This review examines the status of development, process performance and life cycle environmental impact of the three major recycling routes for lithium ion batteries and considers the impact of changes in legislation in the European Union (EU). Today, new lithium-ion battery-recycling technologies are under development while a change in the legal requirements for recycling targets is under way. Thus, an evaluation of the performance of these technologies is critical for stakeholders in politics, industry, and research. We evaluate 209 publications and compare three major recycling routes. An important aspect of this review is that we tackle the need for a critical evaluation of these recycling routes by introducing clear terms and creating a structuring scheme. Our evaluation criteria cover three areas: status of development, process performance, and life-cycle environmental impacts. With respect to development status, we provide an analysis of today’s market. A criterion of process performance is recycling efficiency, which today focuses on the mass of the recovered materials. To include the contributions of critical materials, we add a criterion for the efficiency of recovery of materials. Life-cycle assessments provide information on gross impacts, benefit of substituting virgin material and net impact. Present life-cycle assessments focus on waste management rather than on recovery of critical materials. This review contributes to an understanding of these trade-offs and supports discussion as to what is the “best” recycling route when targets conflict. Graphical Abstract There are three possible process sequences for each lithium-ion battery-recycling route. A distinction is made between pre-treatment steps (gray), direct physical treatment steps (green), pyro-metallurgical treatment (orange), and hydro-metallurgical treatment (blue). The figure is based on a figure from Doose et al. (Joule 3:2622–2646, 2019).