Purpose: On pursue of economic revenue, the second life of electric vehicle batteries is closer to reality. Common electric vehicles reach the end of life when batteries loss between a 20 or 30% of its capacity. However, battery technology is evolving fast and the next generation of electric vehicles will have between 300 and 400 km range. This study will analyze different End of Life scenarios according to battery capacity and their possible second life’s opportunities. Additionally, an analysis of the electric vehicle market will define possible locations for battery repurposing or remanufacturing plants.Design/methodology/approach: Calculating the barycenter of the electric vehicle market offers an optimal location to settle the battery repurposing plant from a logistic and environmental perspective.This paper presents several possible applications and remanufacture processes of EV batteries according to the state of health after their collection, analyzing both the direct reuse of the battery and the module dismantling strategy.Findings: The study presents that Netherlands is the best location for installing a battery repurposing plant because of its closeness to EV manufacturers and the potential European EV markets, observing a strong relation between the EV market share and the income per capita.15% of the batteries may be send back to the an EV as a reposition battery, 60% will be prepared for stationary or high capacity installations such as grid services, residential use, Hybrid trucks or electric boats, and finally, the remaining 25% is to be dismantled into modules or cells for smaller applications, such as bicycles or assisting robots.Originality/value: Most of studies related to the EV battery reuse take for granted that they will all have an 80% of its capacity. This study analyzes and proposes a distribution of battery reception and presents different 2nd life alternatives according to their state of health.

The primary focus in electrifying the transportation sector should be sustainability. This can be effectively attained through the application of the seven eco-efficiency principles, which constitute the global standard for assessing the sustainability of products. Consequently, this framework should guide the development of current electric vehicle designs. The first section of the present article assesses the alignment of the automotive industry with these sustainability requirements. Results show that even though the electric vehicle promotes the use of cleaner energy resources, it falls short of adhering to the remaining principles. The implementation of advanced models in battery management systems holds great potential to enhance lithium-ion battery systems’ overall performance, increasing the durability of the batteries and their intensity of use. While many studies focus on improving current electric equivalent models, this research delves into the potential applicability of Reduced-Order Model techniques for physics-based models within a battery management systems context to determine the different health, charge, or other estimations. This study sets the baseline for further investigations aimed at enhancing the reduced-order physics-based modeling field. A research line should be aimed at developing advanced and improved cell-state indicators, with enhanced physical insight, for various lithium-ion battery applications.

It is, undoubtedly, a widespread belief that the electric vehicle (EV) is considered sustainable. However, in the manufacturing and retirement phases, EVs do not appear to be as sustainable as internal combustion vehicles (ICVs) and during the use phase, the pollution produced by EVs depends on the source of electricity generation to recharge the batteries. From an economic point of view, EVs do not appear to be competitive compared to ICVs either. However, current market trends push hard on battery EVs (BEV) and plug-in hybrid vehicles (PHEV). This study aims to analyze which of the possible mobility alternatives has more sense to be considered as the option with higher penetration in the future. To this end, four known mobility technologies (ICVs, PHEVs, BEVs, and hydrogen fuel cell EVs or FCEVs) are compared for a mid-size car using published data, through environmental and techno-economic criteria, by applying the analytic hierarchy process method in an objective manner on multiple scenarios. Putting all criteria together, it seems that the ICV alternative is the one receiving the best results in most of the scenarios, except in the case where the environmental criteria have the greatest weight. The BEV solution has almost always turned out to be the worst alternative, but it is the only choice we have right now.

The inertization of sewage sludge in ceramic matrices to be used in structural or red ceramic material for buildings has proved to be a good case of reuse of waste material. However, its practical application has not yet been fully implemented in real-case scenarios, and environmental concern seems to be the main hurdle to overcome for its definitive massive approval by the building industry. In this contribution, air emissions related to the sintering of ceramic bricks made of mixtures of clay with some percentage of sewage sludge have been analyzed (in terms of gases, suspended particles and odors). Tests conducted during this work have shown higher VOC emissions in samples with some percentage of sludge in their composition (still under the regulated emission limit values), and some of them (mercaptans) are associated with odor nuisances. Besides, limit emissions values were exceeded by three inorganic pollutants (suspended particles, NO_x and HCl). Measurements in an industrial scenario test showed a high variability in air pollution emissions, suggesting the need of in situ testing for definitive implementation. With the experience collected in this and several previous works in the area of emissions related to the production of added sewage sludge ceramic, some guidelines and recommendations are given to minimize the environmental impact of ceramic production plants implementing this particular waste revalorization process. Guidelines cover different aspects: workplace implementation of gas cleaning equipment; geographical context and local wind pattern analysis; monitoring of emission and immission levels; and information policy through social control participation procedures for reporting of nuisance episodes.

In both design and project management, it is usually necessary to make decisions based on criteria that, in many cases, are not completely objective. One of the most widely used methods to assist in multi-criteria decision making is the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). The construction of the pairwise comparison matrix is the most critical element of the AHP method. Its construction usually requires a group of experts to make value judgments among the criteria for evaluating alternatives. This article presents a simple and objective method to construct the AHP pairwise comparison matrix, thereby reducing the degree of subjectivity. This contribution focuses on the step of assigning the scale values (1-9) to build the criteria matrix. The only step that requires human intervention is the ranking of the criteria. The rest of the steps can be programmed, e.g., in a spreadsheet, and performed automatically. Two options are presented to relate the criteria based on their positions in the ranking: option A by means of the ratios of the order of the criteria, and option B by means of the differences in the order of the criteria. The applicability of both options is evaluated using hypothetical cases compared to the rank-order centroid weight method, and an example taken from the literature. Both options of the method give good results, but option B seems to be more appropriate for problems with more than five criteria. Option A would be the most appropriate for problems with three to five criteria.

The European Union aims to recycle 60% of its total waste by 2030, for which waste collection infrastructure and the source-separation behaviour of waste producers are among the crucial prerequisites. Proper source separation increases the chances of waste getting recycled. For this, identifying the key drivers influencing the source separation behaviour is crucial. The present study identified 12 drivers for each non-demographic and demographic category from 43 scientific publications and calculated their relative importance based on the perceptions of three groups: (i) the expert group, (ii) the population group from Leoben (Austria), and (iii) population group from Barcelona (Spain). Using the pairwise comparison matrix of the Analytical Hierarchy Process, weights were calculated based on the relative importance of the drivers. From the non-demographic category, ‘Beliefs and values’, ‘Environmental concern’, and ‘Habits’ were rated as most important, while from the demographic category, ‘Level of education’ and ‘Location’ had the highest importance. The results were discussed in terms of biodegradable plastic waste.