Designing Supply Chain Networks for Recycling Lithium Batteries in Latin America
摘要
Increasing demands for Lithium-Ion Batteries, LIB, driven by the electric vehicle market development worldwide, has significantly demanded dealing with end-of-life batteries. Hence, recycling emerges as a strategy to recover valuable materials and mitigate environmental impacts. Thus, an optimization model for designing LIB recycling supply chain networks is developed integrating economic and environmental aspects. The proposed biobjective formulation optimizes network design related costs and CO₂ emissions, determining optimal location of LIB collection facilities, and recycling plants. The network comprises collecting discarded LIB, conversion into raw materials for external manufacturing processes, and deliveries of obtained products to markets. The proposal highlights its ability to involves multiple LIB types, being adaptable to different practical contexts. The formulation is applied to a case study in Latin-America, where LIB recycling has not been massively established. The case study was built for evaluating collecting and recycling locations in several Latin-American countries, identifying optimal configurations for relevant scenarios, thus, highlighting its adaptability for different contexts and settings. Results for most scenarios suggest that optimal locations for collection facilities are Mexico, Brazil and Panama, and for the recycling plant is Panama. These configurations may be an initial basis for a LIB recycling supply chain network in Latin-America.