With the accelerated adoption of electric vehicles (EV) over internal combustion engine vehicles, it is increasingly critical to ensure the sustainability of EVs. For example, the environmental impact of lithium-ion batteries (LiBs), the energy storage of choice in most EVs, is an area of concern as it requires carbon-intensive production and requires raw material with high embodied carbon. Additionally, despite retaining a high state-of-health (~70-80%) at the vehicle’s end-of-life, they are commonly not accepted for direct reuse in EVs. To alleviate environmental impact and increase battery circularity, retired LiBs from EVs that are in good condition should be repurposed or remanufactured for second-life deployment. Although environmental sustainability improvement from these second-life deployments is probable, they are not guaranteed. Factors such as the condition of the retired LiBs and the resources required to prepare them for the intended deployment can all influence the environmental impact of the second-life applications. To ensure that the second-life application is not net-negative, assessing its viability is necessary. This necessitates understanding the environmental impact of the LiBs under different second-life scenarios. Unfortunately, data on the environmental performance of LiBs across these scenarios remains fragmented and limited in existing databases. To address this gap, this work aims to consolidate existing studies on the environmental impacts of second-life LiBs applications through a systematic literature review. From the review, it was evident that there is a noticeable lack of research on the environmental impact of LiB remanufacturing and second-life applications beyond stationary energy storage. Additionally, most studies only consider retired LiB with a state-of-health of 80% and do not disaggregate their activity data. This limits the usability of their reported data for secondary analysis, especially when the conditions diverge from those assumptions.
Lee et al. (Thu,) studied this question.