Optimal design of electric vehicle battery recycling network – From the perspective of electric vehicle manufacturers

Driven by the global campaign against climate change, the market of electric vehicles has boomed across the world in recent years. Since Lithium-Ion batteries are commonly used to power electric vehicles, a huge amount of batteries will soon reach their end-of-life; how to recycle them to reduce environmental pollution and promoting the sustainable development of the electric vehicle market has become an urgent challenge today. Implementation of the secondary reuse of used electric vehicle batteries is a valuable recycling strategy. However, there is a lack of research investigating electric vehicle batteries recycling network design at the enterprise level, which impedes the sustainable development of electric vehicles. Driven by this, this paper developed a model considering carbon emission for simulating the recycling of electric vehicle batteries. The proposed model takes into account three potential battery handling strategies (recycling, remanufacturing, and disposal) to processing used vehicle battery cells of different quality levels at different centers. A real case study from a Chinese electric vehicle manufacturer is presented, wherein a 5.7% decrease in total cost and a 21.8% reduction in CO₂ emission can be achieved. Moreover, the results of the scenario analysis show that transportation costs, carbon tax, and the number of used batteries, which can change both the configuration of the network, have been identified as three major factors affecting the optimal design of recycling networks. In addition, developing more economical recycling technology for electric vehicle manufacturers to further reduce the total cost of the recycling process is the main direction. In all, this research will provide foreign researchers with a perspective on Chinese companies in terms of electric vehicle battery recycling at the enterprise level, and promote economically and environmentally sustainable development in the electric vehicle battery industry.