ISO 14040 and ISO 14044

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Battery carbon footprint

The greenhouse gases emitted to make a battery, typically 50–100 kg CO₂-equivalent per kWh, dominated by cathode materials and the electricity used in cell production. The EU regulation requires it to be declared and will later cap it.

Functional unit

The quantified service against which a life-cycle assessment reports its results, so that different products can be compared fairly. For EU battery carbon footprints it is one kilowatt-hour of total energy delivered over the battery’s service life, so a longer-lived battery spreads its production emissions over more energy.

Life-cycle assessment

The method for totalling a product’s environmental impact from raw material to end of life, standardised in ISO 14040. For a battery it is what turns mining, production, use and recycling data into a carbon footprint.

Product Environmental Footprint

The European Commission’s harmonised life-cycle method, which scores a product on 16 environmental impact categories, climate change among them. Category rules, PEFCRs, fix the functional unit, system boundary and data for one product group — rechargeable batteries had one from the pilot phase — and the EU Battery Regulation’s carbon-footprint rules build on the method.

System boundary

The line in a life-cycle assessment between the processes counted and those left out. The EU’s battery carbon-footprint rules include raw-material extraction, production, distribution and end of life but exclude the use stage, so the footprint describes how the battery is made and recycled, not how clean the electricity that charges it is.

References & further reading

Further reading on this topic

These sources provide broader context; they are not presented as citations for every statement in this entry.

1. Regulation (EU) 2023/1542 concerning batteries and waste batteries

   European Union / EUR-Lex · 2023

   Topic background · Battery sustainability, information, waste management and battery passport provisions. Consult the current consolidated text and applicable implementing acts.