Comparison of waste lithium-ion batteries recycling methods by different decision making techniques

Abstract

Today, to reduce fossil fuel consumption and to prevent gas emissions that are increasing day by day, vehicles working with electrical energy have started to be produced and developed. The environmental impact of the batteries of electric vehicles, which are increasing in number, is an undeniable fact and is predicted to be a major problem. In this study, three different alternative recycling processes were selected for waste lithium-ion batteries (LIBs), namely pyrometallurgical process, hydrometallurgical process and direct recycling.These processes were compared in terms of their technical, economic, environmental and social aspects using a Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) approach.. From this point of view, in this study, entropy method which is an objective method was used to weight the criteria and Analytic Network Process (ANP) and TOPSIS methods were used to prioritise the alternatives in order to determine the best process for the recycling of waste LIBs. The alternatives were determined as being pyrometallurgical process, hydrometallurgical process and direct recycling, and these alternatives were evaluated in terms of environmental, economic, technical, and social dimensions. Afterwards, sensitivity analysis was performed. The ranking results showed that direct recycling is the best alternative (with values of 0.68 and 0.8101 for ANP and TOPSIS, respectively). In addition, sensitivity analysis was applied for the robustness of the results. As a result of the sensitivity analysis, direct recycling was found to be the best alternative.