Our Collaborative Study on Battery Recycling Published in Nature Communications Hit Stanford Report Headline!

Our recent study analyzing environmental impacts of lithium-ion battery recycling was published in Nature Communications, titled "Life cycle comparison of industrial-scale lithium-ion battery recycling and mining supply chains"!

With the rapid growth of electric vehicles and coming retirement of lithium-ion batteries (LIBs), recycling used LIBs to transform their critical metals to raw materials has been identified as a key for advancing a more sustainable battery manufacturing. Prof. Chen and his team collaborated with Redwood Materials, a pioneering U.S. battery recycling company, for the first time analyzed the practical industrial-scale LIB recycling and compared to the conventional mining supply chains.

The study quantified the environmental footprint of this recycling process, and found it emits less than half the greenhouse gases (GHGs) of conventional mining and refinement of these metals and uses about one-fourth of the water and energy of mining new metals. Input electricity was identified as a principal contributor to the environmental impacts in circular LIB refinement, and upstream steps (extraction and transport) exhibited only marginal effects to the whole supply chains.

The article hit the headline of Stanford Report and the website of Stanford School of Engineering, and was also reported by Bloomberg earlier.

Redwood: https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/

Stanford Report: https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2025/01/recycling-lithium-ion-batteries-cuts-emissions-and-strengthens-supply-chain

Stanford Engineering: https://engineering.stanford.edu/news/recycling-lithium-ion-batteries-delivers-significant-environmental-benefits

Bloomberg: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-24/battery-recycling-shatters-the-myth-of-ev-battery-waste?embedded-checkout=true