Life cycle carbon emissions of lead acid battery manufacturing in Pakistan with a modeled china circular recycling benchmark

Battery waste and lead-acid battery production remain important environmental concerns in developing economies where fossil-intensive electricity systems, diesel backup generation, and informal recycling practices are common. This study quantifies life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions from lead-acid battery manufacturing in Pakistan using primary 2024 industrial operational data from Treet Corporation, Lahore, and compares these results with a modeled prospective China 2025 circular-recycling benchmark developed from secondary literature and GREET-based inventory data. An attributional life cycle assessment framework was applied using 1 kWh of installed nominal battery capacity as the main functional unit, with lifetime delivered electricity used as a supplementary sensitivity normalization. The Pakistan facility consumed 250,000 kWh of electricity and 21,000 L of diesel per month, resulting in production-stage emissions of 176.3 t \(CO_2\) eq/month. The corresponding gate-to-gate production-stage carbon intensity was estimated at 293.8 kg \(CO_2\) eq/kWh of installed nominal battery capacity. Electricity accounted for 68.1% of production emissions, while diesel backup generation contributed 31.9%. The China case should therefore be interpreted as a modeled benchmark scenario rather than a parallel empirical facility-level case. Under this prospective circular-recycling scenario, total lifecycle emissions are estimated to be approximately 34% lower than the Pakistan linear baseline; however, this reduction represents a model-estimated potential mitigation outcome rather than an observed cross-country difference. The magnitude of reduction is sensitive to electricity-grid intensity, use-phase assumptions, recycling efficiency, and allocation method. The findings indicate that electricity carbon intensity, diesel dependence, recycling allocation assumptions, and end-of-life management structure are the dominant drivers of lead-acid battery lifecycle environmental performance. The study provides a facility-level carbon-accounting baseline for Pakistan and highlights the importance of electricity decarbonization and formal recycling systems in reducing lifecycle emissions.