Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment Strategy for NMC Lithium-ion Battery

Lithium-ion batteries have emerged as the technological choice for powering electric vehicles. A variety of materials and elements are used to produce these batteries; these materials are extracted from natural resources and are not renewable. This study aims to review the sustainability of the production of lithium-ion batteries, namely Lithium-Nickel-Manganese-Cobalt-Oxide batteries, highlighting the major contributors to their environmental, economic, and social impacts and propose a Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment Strategy to identify a reference point. The characterization of a reference point allows changes or improvements over time and also helps to evaluate the effectiveness of sustainability strategies. A literature review was conducted to understand the main drivers of lithium-ion battery production for the three domains of sustainability, taking into consideration studies based on methodologies including Life Cycle Assessment, Material Flow Cost Accounting, and Social Life Cycle Assessment. The results of this paper demonstrate that applying this approach will help organizations define their line of thinking based on what exists in the market, helping stakeholders to define sustainable practices in the course of their product development. The sustainability results evidence that the main impacts arising during the battery production phase are mainly due to the materials used in the composition of the cathode’s active material, such as cobalt, nickel, and lithium. The analysis of the Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment leads to the same key challenges, i.e., it is necessary to reduce the dependency on primary resources and, ideally, move towards batteries with fewer primary Critical Raw Materials.