Shaping China's Automotive Lithium-Ion Battery Recycling System to Meet the Retirement Wave: Insights from Integrated Modeling.

Abstract

China's expanding electric-vehicle fleet drives large battery retirements, yet national-scale evidence linking retirement geography to cost-optimal network design and prospective life-cycle impacts remains limited. To address this, we integrate city- and chemistry-resolved retirements, network optimization, and prospective LCA to minimize total system cost and quantify environmental impacts. We compare a hydrometallurgical baseline (Hydro pathway; shipping intact packs) with a high-voltage pulsed-discharge variant (HVPD pathway; shipping delaminated powder), sharing downstream hydrometallurgical refining. Modeling 10.4 Mt yr^-1 of retirements (average over 2040-2050), optimization identifies two distinct configurations: Hydro favors a distributed mesh near hotspots, whereas HVPD supports centralized hub-and-spoke structures. Using 1 kg NMC811 (LiNi_0.8Mn_0.1Co_0.1O₂) cathode material production from end-of-life packs as the functional unit, HVPD lowers total cost by about 10% versus Hydro under their respective cost-optimal networks, driven by scale economies and reduced transport burdens. Across prospective background scenarios (reflecting evolving electricity systems and upstream supply chains), recycling reduces global warming potential (1-42%), fossil-fuel potential (3-28%), surplus ore potential (about 67%), and carcinogenic human toxicity potential (20-30%) relative to primary production, with HVPD consistently lower. Overall, shifting the shipped form from packs to powder reshapes cost-optimal network geometry while reducing total system cost and life-cycle impacts.