Evaluating the lithium-ion battery recycling industry in an emerging economy: A multi-stakeholder and multi-criteria decision-making approach

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2021.130007Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Identify and analyze critical barriers and enablers of LIB recycling.

  • Systematic literature review and a 3-stage Delphi study are applied.

  • Grey theory is blended with DEMATEL technique to evaluate interdependencies.

  • Perform comparative assessment of different stakeholders' perspectives.

  • Propose a decision-making framework from a developing economy perspective.

Abstract

Lithium-ion battery (LIB), a prime residual energy source for electric vehicles (EVs), entails a market showing exponential growth with the rising global push towards electric mobility. However, such an increase leaves us with ‘big battery waste problem’ as these LIBs approach their end-of-life (EoL). Moreover, despite the availability of technologies for complete recycling of used LIBs, the lack of authorized recycling facilities and poor policy framework would hinder sustainable mobility. This study focuses on a multi-stakeholder perspective in compiling and synthesizing the key barriers and enablers of LIB recycling within the PESTEL (political, economic, social, technological, environmental, and legal) framework. The barriers and enablers are identified using a systematic literature review and a 3-stage Delphi study on various experts from the LIB recycling industry in India. Grey theory is blended with DEMATEL (decision making trial and evaluation laboratory) technique to evaluate interdependencies among the constituting factors. It is followed by a comparative assessment that highlights the essence of different stakeholder perspectives. The results indicate inadequacy in recycling regulations in government policies and take-back schemes in the stakeholder business model as the most significant barrier and enabler, respectively. The current work proposes a decision-making framework defining multi-stakeholder roles for effective LIB recycling in an emerging economy.

Introduction

“The rise of electric cars could leave us with a big battery waste problem. […] Carmakers, recyclers, and tech startups are working to solve the question of how to deal with lithium-ion batteries when they wear out.” —(Gardiner, 2017)

“Recycling of Li-ion Batteries will deliver long-term sustainable value for India. […] It is also an opportunity for a re-look at the principles of sustainability and circular economy of recycling and reuse, especially of Li-ion batteries, for which the possibilities are endless in India.” — (Lobo, 2020)

As evident from the above statements, the automobile industry is pushing towards electric mobility for both personal and public modes of futuristic urban transportation. The core component driving a sustainable growth will be the residual sources of energy in other words, the battery of electric vehicles (EVs). The superior properties of Lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) have made them the ‘batteries of choice’ for EVs (Zeng et al., 2014). As India joined other global players such as the USA, the EU, Japan and China in a substantial inclusion of EVs in their transportation policies, the LIB market is projected to grow exponentially by 2030 (Bonu and Panigrahi, 2019; Fan et al., 2020). Such growth of LIBs, however raise the question about ‘big battery waste problem’ (Gardiner, 2017), which is caused by the toxic gases released from damaged batteries. It also leads to resource scarcity of raw materials which are required to meet the rising demand of LIBs. In their report, Juyal et al. (2018) posit the exigency of establishing a LIB recycling industry in India. However, the Indian LIB recycling industry is still in infancy and spent batteries from EVs are barely recycled.

Even at the global level, there is a recycling gap owing to various binding factors that range from operational issues to strategic-level issues (Ai and Borucki, 2019; Rahman and Afroz, 2017). Closed-loop supply chain (CLSC) implementation can help close this gap (Sasikumar and Haq, 2011). CLSC is “the design, control, and operation of a system to maximize value creation over the entire life cycle of a product with the dynamic recovery of value from different types and volumes of returns over time” (Guide and Van Wassenhove, 2009). When returned batteries flow back to the manufacturer for recycling, these recovered components can be used for new battery manufacturing, which is then brought to market; battery recycling can be considered a CLSC network. LIB recycling can be conceptualized as a consolidation of CLSC management and environmental concerns using the industrial ecology theory (Das and Posinasett, 2015; Nasir et al., 2017). This theory highlights the need to extract the maximum value out of the resources (LIB) by re-entering the products approaching the end-of-life (EoL) cycle into the supply chain—recycling being one of the essential means. Only a few studies have focused on recycling or end-of-life (EoL) management of LIBs (Mohr et al., 2020; Zeng et al., 2014). Most of these articles are confined to conceptual foundations (Ciez and Whitacre, 2019; King and Boxall, 2019) or analytical methodologies such as material flow analysis (Hao et al., 2017; Richa et al., 2014) and life cycle assessment (Raugei and Winfield, 2019; Yang et al., 2019). These are not adequate to unravel complex decision-making problems typical to the present context, more so for a developing country. In the face of a nascent policy framework for LIB recycling, it becomes vital to identify critical factors that play a role in proliferating or failing a LIB-CLSC—often manifesting as enablers or barriers, respectively.

Moreover, a developing country such as India would offer a unique set of barriers and enablers to LIB recycling that are representative of its volatile economy. Concerned stakeholders may avoid common pitfalls if they can decipher these enablers and barriers and the decision-making complexities formed from their interrelationships. Further, it is vital to evaluate the inter-relationship among the identified factors to find the degree of influence of these factors regarding their prominence and causality. However, to the best of our knowledge, the literature is silent on identifying the key barriers and enablers to LIB recycling and evaluating the inter-relationship among them from a multi-stakeholder perspective. Existing studies are thereby seen to be scrambling for answers with the following questions:

  • (1)

    What are the key barriers and enablers to LIB recycling?

  • (2)

    What are the key barriers and enablers to LIB recycling in the Indian context?

  • (3)

    Which criteria are the most prominent from different stakeholder perspectives?

  • (4)

    How can decision-makers evaluate the inter-relationship among the identified barriers and enablers?

We answer these questions by using the stakeholder theory to develop a multi-stakeholder perspective on the decision-making process involved in proliferating the LIB recycling industry. We focus on compiling and synthesizing the key barriers and enablers within the PESTEL (political, economic, social, technological, environmental, and legal) framework. Solutions for the first and second research questions are provided using a systematic literature review, which is supplemented and validated by a 3-stage Delphi study on various experts from the Indian LIB recycling industry. The targeted pool of 32 experts is grouped into three clusters – practitioners, policymakers, and academic researchers – to represent the multiple stakeholder perspective. The output of the Delphi study becomes the input data for a multiple-criteria decision-making problem defined by blending grey theory with DEMATEL (decision making trial and evaluation laboratory) technique to evaluate interdependencies among the constituting factors of the barriers and enablers.

The contributions of this study include:

  • Identifying the critical factors that act as barriers and enablers to LIB recycling from a developing economy perspective.

  • Understanding the use of an integrated Delphi study with grey-DEMATEL technique to evaluate interdependencies among them.

  • Applying stakeholder theory into the PESTEL framework to incorporate heterogeneous nuances of multi-stakeholder perspectives on LIB recycling.

This paper focuses on defining the present and future landscape of LIB recycling in India by using a multi-stakeholder and multi-criteria decision-making approach, which features a hybrid Delphi study. The proposed research framework used in the study is illustrated in Fig. 1. The paper is divided into six sections, with a detailed literature review highlighting the research gaps in section 2. This is followed by a brief explanation of the methodology in section 3. Section 4 presents the data collection process for the Delphi study, along with the DEMATEL results. The multi-stakeholder implications of the findings are discussed in section 5, while section 6 concludes the paper.

Section snippets

Literature review

This section is a comprehensive review of the existing literature, which is necessary to recognize the relevant barriers and enablers to LIB recycling. Identifying and acknowledging critical literature gaps lay the groundwork in framing decisions for transitioning towards more sustainable LIB recycling practices. The significance of developing such a system in India can be realized in light of the recurrent call for more sustainable energy and emission control strategies highlighted by several

Methodology

The premise of the stakeholder theory helps lay the foundation of identifying all key stakeholders in the LIB recycling industry, considering its link with optimizing CLSC and environmental concerns (Matos and Hall, 2007). The key contribution of the stakeholder theory can be seen in terms of enabling sustainable development of this budding industry by incorporating different stakeholders into the decision-making process from the different PESTEL dimensions. As such, this theory is applied into

Research results

The proposed research framework from Fig. 1 to evaluate barriers and enablers for LIB recycling is applied and presented in this section.

Discussion

We discuss the results for barriers and enablers, where we do a comparative assessment by highlighting the essence of the similarities and dissimilarities in different stakeholder perspectives. The relationships among the barriers/enablers are plotted using a digraph for a particular case of stakeholder perspective that plots Pi values on the horizontal axis, and Ei values on the vertical axis. The two axes divide the digraph into four quadrants viz. Q1, Q2, Q3, and Q4, which aid in visualizing

Conclusion

With increasing adoption of EVs, the demand for LIBs is rising exponentially owing to their lightweight and high electrochemical potential. Promoting EVs as a solution for sustainable mobility brings forth the blatant question about resource management of these LIBs. Recycling of these batteries does not only solve the massive environmental costs but also provides meaningful additions into the value chain in terms of employment generation. Any delays in setting up an LIB recycling industry in

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Atanu Bhuyan: Writing – original draft, Formal analysis, Methodology, Software, Investigation, Visualization, Writing – review & editing. Asit Tripathy: Conceptualization, Writing – original draft, Formal analysis, Methodology, Investigation, Visualization, Writing – review & editing. R.K. Padhy: Conceptualization, Investigation, Project administration, Supervision. Amitosh Gautam: Investigation, Resources, Project administration.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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