From Mining to Mobility: Evaluating Environmental Challenges across the Critical Materials Supply Chain for New Energy Vehicles

Abstract

This review sums up existing information on the environmental issues of critical materials in new energy vehicles (NEVs) on a combined mining to mobility approach. With the increase in the rate of NEV adoption, the environmental cost of operating vehicles will decline as the burden moves to upstream and downstream material life-cycle activities, such as extraction, beneficiation, refining, component manufacturing, use-phase performance, and end-of-life management. We focus on key material categories that provide electrified mobility, such as battery-related material (e.g., Li, Ni, Co, Mn, graphite), high-performance motor-related material (e.g., rare earth elements), conductive and lightweighting material (e.g., Cu and Al). In the supply chain, the prevailing environmental forces consist of high energy requirements and related greenhouse gas emissions, excessive water consumption and water pollution risks, toxicity and human health issues pertaining to chemical inputs and metal discharges, land-use shift, and ecosystem and biodiversity effects. The review notes that there is high regional heterogeneity, which is fueled by ore grades, processing technologies, electricity mixes, and governance capacity, and that when measurements are narrowed to carbon measures, there is a risk of shifting the problem across geographies and categories of impacts. Mitigation pathways are analyzed, such as cleaner extraction and refining, material substitution and dematerialization, battery design, longevity and recyclability, and also the strategies of the circular economy, such as recycling and second-life use. Lastly, we establish research gaps in important areas of supply-chain data disclosure, multi-impact life-cycle assessment approaches, and integrated environmental-social analysis to enable sound policy formulation that can be used to achieve sustainable electrified mobility.