Enabling Battery Circularity with Blockchain Technology: An Exploratory Study of Key Benefits
摘要
While the shift from fossil-fuel vehicles to electric vehicles (EVs) offers a promising solution to environmental concerns, managing end-of-life batteries poses significant challenges. Achieving circularity in EV batteries remains a complex and underdeveloped area in commercial practice. It requires coordinated efforts across the ecosystem, comprising diverse actors such as battery manufacturers, original equipment manufacturers, and recyclers to share data, trace batteries, and implement strategies that extend battery life and enhance material recovery. In this context, blockchain technology emerges as a promising enabler, offering features such as traceability, smart contracts, consensus mechanisms, and decentralization and capabilities that support transparency, trust, and efficient coordination among ecosystem actors. However, the application of blockchain in the battery context is still emerging, and many actors face uncertainty regarding its practical implementation, despite the strengths highlighted in literature. The purpose of this paper is therefore to identify the potential role of blockchain technology features in enabling battery circularity. We conducted an exploratory investigation involving seven companies within the EV battery ecosystem. The analysis identifies key benefits associated with blockchain's core features: four each for traceability, smart contracts, three for consensus mechanisms, and two for decentralization. These findings contribute to the literature on the circular economy and blockchain-enabled circularity, particularly in the context of EV battery lifecycle management.