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

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:Provides a structured overview of environmental issues and research gaps in critical materials for NEVs, useful for LCA and supply chain scholars.

🏢実務担当者:Helps corporate sustainability teams in auto and battery industries understand and mitigate supply chain environmental risks.

🏛政策担当者:Highlights the need for integrated environmental-social analysis and data disclosure to support sustainable NEV policies.

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.

• semanticscholar https://doi.org/10.30564/jees.v8i3.13104first seen 2026-05-05 22:00:01