Sustainable Manufacturing and Circular Economy

For decades, batteries have been made in the way that they can be made. Focusing on how batteries should be made enables stronger understanding of this field. This logic applies to mineral extraction, active material production, cell production, second life opportunities, and recycling. 

Manufacturing and value chains are two coherently aspects of this topic. Manufacturing can cover resource extraction, electrode and other battery components, cell assembly and quality assurance, pack and module engineering and production, and demanufacturing, recycling and upcycling.

Circularity covers the embedded value brought into a value chain and the understanding of how this value is retained within or lost via dilution or uptake by other value chains. Circularity indicates a value chain in which pristine materials are, over time, replaced via the reuse of spent materials, thus closing the loop. This stands in contrast to a linear value chain, in which all materials are fed into a value change and exit after products are no longer of use, then being treated as waste. As such, transcending the end of a value chain adds a “waste management” perspective into more sustainable perspectives of “resource utilization”, as well as “quality preservation and improvement”, and it is, thus, of importance.

For many decades, lead acid batteries dominated global manufacturing. Nickel cadmium and nickel metal hydride have also been key technologies for mobile electronics. The Lithium-ion battery family has, for years, represented the dominant type among batteries entering the global market. Sodium-ion batteries, as well as other next-generation batteries, could soon emerge as key technologies enabling the growth of emerging and existing markets. Naturally, expanding value chains are not yet circular. As the lithium-ion battery value chain has doubled its annual capacity every three years, doing so for around two decades, the returning material amounts required for loop closing the value chain will remain a fraction of the virgin material needs for years to come. Recognizing this issue represents a timely point to start maximizing resource utilization. The preservation or value chain conservation of material flow is an objective of research published in this section. This section, therefore, welcomes efforts to make the value chains of all battery technologies more sustainable and circular. 

The "Sustainable Manufacturing and Circular Economy” section aims to evolve and help engineers, scientists, entrepreneurs and others contribute to the scientific literature, identifying the best pathways for future manufacturing. Improving the weakest link, as well as understanding propagation into and between links in value chains, is vital for improving sustainability and circularity.

This section focuses around experimental and numerical efforts, aiming to understand and create pathways for increasing sustainability and circularity in value chains of and related to batteries.

Example foci include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Elements towards sustainable manufacturing:
• Active materials, e.g., anodes, cathodes, electrolytes, electrolyte salts.
• Passive materials, e.g., binders, conductive agents, current collectors, cell enclosures, pack and system materials,  
• Component manufacturing, e.g., solvent based slurry processing, dry electrode processing, electrode casting or printing, drying, calendering, line operation.
• Cell manufacturing, e.g., assembly, recyclable designs, line operation, factory modelling.
• Pack and module manufacturing and designs.
• Second life prospects, procedures, and compatibility.
• Recycling, e.g., pyrometallurgy, hydrometallurgy, direct recycling, upcycling.
• Value chain; understanding how value chain elements affect each other.
• Sustainability and value chain analysis:
• Environmental assessments, life and value cycle assessment (LCA/CCA),  environmental impact indicator assessment.
• Technical advancements, numerical efforts in sustainability analysis, etc.
• Material efficiency, battery passports assessments, materials criticality analyses, block chain assessments, traceability.
• Costs and market: Understanding footprint and economic viability, as well as what it takes to transform existing models into more sustainable ones.