We congratulate Anders Nordelöf and Anita Bonguards for winning the prestigious EVS Best Paper Award. They won in the lecture category for the paper “Allocating the environmental burdens in co-production of rare earth elements for EV magnets”.
The selection is done by the EVS38 International Programme Committee based on the quality of the abstracts, the full paper reviews, and the overall contribution to the field.
Abstract:
Life cycle assessment (LCA) provides information for the environmental reporting of products containing rare earth elements (REEs), for example in the European Union. However, REEs occur jointly in today’s viable mineral deposits, meaning that the supply chain for rare earth oxides (REOs) that constitutes the input to permanent magnet fabrication for electric vehicle traction motors, encompasses inherent methodological challenges for LCA modelling – allocation of burdens between co-products from joint production. This study investigates how different allocation methods influence LCA results for global warming per kilogram of individual REO, as well as per kilogram of ready-made magnet and for a complete EV traction motor, i.e. life cycle scopes where allocation problems are given little attention so far in LCA studies of REEs.
Read the full paper:
https://research.chalmers.se/publication/547008/file/547008_Fulltext.pdf