Multicriteria Environmental Assessment and Decision-Making for Graphite Recycling Routes via an Integrated LCA-TOPSIS Approach

The rapid proliferation of lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) has generated substantial quantities of spent graphite anodes, creating an emerging industrial solid-waste stream that requires sustainable management. Although increasing attention has been devoted to spent anode recycling, systematic environmental evaluation of graphite purification technologies from a multiimpact perspective remains limited, thereby constraining the development of environmentally optimized recycling routes. In this study, a gate-to-gate life cycle assessment (LCA) framework was established to evaluate representative graphite purification pathways, and an entropy-weighted technique for order preference by similarity to an ideal solution (TOPSIS) model was employed for multicriteria environmental ranking. The results indicated that atmospheric impacts were primarily governed by the carbon intensity of energy inputs, whereas aquatic and terrestrial toxicities were mainly associated with the consumption of chemical reagents. Such contrasting drivers caused a potential trade-off between energy use and reagent demand, creating a risk of cross-media environmental burden shifting when route selection relied on a single indicator. Among the evaluated pathways, the halogenation thermal route exhibited the most balanced environmental performance by simultaneously reducing reagent consumption and energy demand, thereby mitigating the cross-media pollution transfer. This study provides a multiindicator decision framework for environmentally informed selection of spent graphite recycling technologies and supports the sustainable management of this expanding waste stream.