Eco-design Framework for a Battery Sustainable Lifecycle Management

Batteries are becoming increasingly important due to their many applications in sectors such as energy, transport, and electronic devices, making them a key component for the green industrial revolution. Supranational bodies as the European Commission also recognize their importance. Batteries have critical issues throughout their life cycle that hinder a true ecological transition, including the use of critical raw materials, high carbon footprint in manufacturing processes, and difficulties in recycling and disassembly at end-of-life. To address these issues, eco-design is the only model capable of reducing or eliminating the problems at the root, improving the impacts of the upstream phases and the effectiveness of the downstream ones. The purpose of this study is to provide a dedicated theoretical framework for eco-design based on existing methodologies, which can be adapted to any scenario and considers all actors of the selected and involved value chain. This framework attempts to eliminate the issues and uncertainties of previous studies and enable the achievement of a truly optimized, feasible, and sustainable design.