Circular Lithium-Ion Battery Recycling for Electric Mobility: A Simulated Techno-Environmental Comparison of Recovery Pathways

This article presents a simulated empirical assessment in Materials Engineering, Energy Systems, and Circular Economy. The illustrative dataset represented 4,200 tonnes of annual battery feed and 96 monthly process-batch observations across three recycling pathways. A simulated annual feedstock of 10,000 end-of-life lithium-ion battery packs was modeled using a mixed chemistry distribution dominated by NMC and LFP cells. Pack-level preprocessing included discharge, dismantling, shredding, and chemistry sorting. Three downstream routes were modeled: conventional pyrometallurgy, hydrometallurgical recovery, and chemistry-preserving direct recycling. Mass balances tracked lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese, copper, aluminum, graphite, and residual fractions. Energy use and process-water requirements were generated from bounded engineering assumptions and normalized per tonne of battery feed. Direct recycling produced the lowest simulated energy and carbon intensity when chemistry sorting was sufficiently accurate, while hydrometallurgy produced the highest combined recovery of lithium, nickel, cobalt, and manganese. Pyrometallurgy remained robust to mixed feed but showed the highest modeled energy demand and lower lithium retention. Under an 85% sorting-accuracy scenario, the direct route reduced simulated energy use by 48% relative to pyrometallurgy. The numerical values are synthetic and are used solely to demonstrate a plausible empirical design, comparative analysis, and journal-style reporting workflow. No real participants, operational institutions, commercial facilities, or field sites were studied. The analysis emphasizes current research trends, multi- metric evaluation, practical trade-offs, and the importance of validation before deployment.