Battery Aging and Circular Economy Strategies: Extending Lifespan and Reducing Environmental Impact

Dear Colleagues,

The rapid deployment of battery energy storage systems is essential for enabling global transition towards renewable and low-carbon energy sources. However, battery aging remains a key challenge affecting performance, lifespan and environmental impact. As batteries degrade over time, questions arise regarding their sustainable use, second-life potential and end-of-life management. This Special Issue aims to explore innovative strategies that address battery aging within the broader framework of the circular economy—extending battery life, reducing resource consumption and minimizing ecological footprints.

1. Focus, Scope and Purpose
2. Focus

This Special Issue will center on the intersection between battery aging and circular economy strategies, with a primary aim of exploring how aging mechanisms in battery technologies can be better understood, managed and integrated into sustainable energy system planning. As energy storage becomes indispensable in the global energy transition, the performance degradation and eventual obsolescence of batteries pose growing sustainability, economic and environmental challenges.

1. Scope

The scope includes—but is not limited to—the following topics:

• Mechanisms and modeling of battery aging (lithium-ion, solid-state and alternative chemistries)
• Lifecycle assessment (LCA) considering battery degradation
• Predictive maintenance and monitoring tools for aging batteries
• Second-life applications and remanufacturing strategies
• Battery reuse and recycling innovations
• Design for durability and recyclability
• Policy frameworks and regulatory considerations supporting circular economy pathways
• Socio-economic implications of battery end-of-life strategies
• Sustainability metrics and indicators for aging and circularity in energy storage

This Special Issue welcomes original research articles, review papers, case studies and policy analyses.

1. Purpose

The purpose is to:

• Highlight the role of battery aging in limiting system-level sustainability in energy storage deployment;
• Promote circular economy strategies that mitigate environmental impacts through extended battery use, reuse and recycling;
• Support interdisciplinary dialog between engineering, environmental science, economics and policy to address the full lifecycle of batteries in sustainable systems.

2. Relationship with Existing Literature

Current research extensively explores battery performance and degradation under various operational conditions, as well as circular economy principles in waste and resource management. However, there is a critical gap in integrating aging phenomena with circular strategies in a unified sustainability framework.

This Special Issue builds upon and supplements existing literature by:

• Bridging the technical understanding of aging with practical circular economy models;
• Encouraging cross-sectoral analyses (engineering + policy + socio-economics) rarely consolidated in a single platform;
• Extending the discussion beyond traditional LCA by incorporating dynamic degradation modeling, real-world usage scenarios and second-life valuation;
• Providing tools and indicators to measure circularity and aging impacts quantitatively—addressing the journal’s goals of defining, quantifying and monitoring sustainability.

By foregrounding battery aging as not an inevitable limitation but a challenge to be mitigated through sustainable and circular strategies, this Issue contributes novel insights and actionable pathways toward more resilient, responsible energy systems.

Prof. Dr. Ali Sari
Dr. Mohammed Kharrich
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• battery aging
• circular economy
• battery lifecycle assessment
• second-life batteries
• battery recycling
• energy storage sustainability
• degradation modeling
• battery management systems (BMS)
• environmental impact
• sustainable energy systems