Market actor-oriented pathway selection for battery recycling: A life-cycle decision-making framework

As the global new energy vehicle industry scales up, mass decommissioning of End-of-life (EoL) batteries has become a core challenge to industrial chain closed-loop safety and ecological protection. Improper recycling causes severe pollution and irreversible loss of strategic metal resources. Most existing studies have focused on recycling technologies themselves, but failed to provide a market actor-oriented full life cycle decision-making framework to support scientific decisions on recycling pathways for diverse battery types and scenarios. Based on three hypotheses, this study proposes a market actor-oriented full life cycle decision-making framework for EoL battery recycling. This framework covers the entire recycling process (collection and transportation, disassembly and sorting, and comprehensive utilization) and integrates life cycle environmental and economic assessment. Moreover, a multi-criteria decision-making model for different retirement scales is developed. These form a multi-dimensional quantitative system for recycling pathway optimization. Results show the Echelon Utilization-Industry Alliance (EU-IA) pathway is the optimal scheme for both NCM and LFP batteries across all scenarios. Compared with the lowest-ranked pathway, it reduces Global Warming Potential (GWP) by 2.03 ∼ 10.79 times for NCM and 50.52 times for LFP batteries. It increases unit profit by 0.39 ∼ 0.75 and 6.59 times for the two types, respectively. As the core innovation of this study, this decision-making framework fills the key gap in existing research by incorporating actor modes into technical evaluation, providing a paradigm for accurate adaptation and dynamic decision-making on battery recycling pathways. The findings offer theoretical and practical guidance on recycling standard-setting, multi-actor cooperation optimization, and balancing environmental and economic performance.