Research Fellow (Life Cycle Assessment of Battery Recycling)

Location: University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK

Full time starting salary is normally in the range £47,389 to £56,535. With potential progression once in post to £63,606 a year.

Fixed Term Contract: 2 years, 01/04/2026 - 31/03/2028

Please note that we reserve the right to close this vacancy early once a sufficient number of applications have been received. 

This is an exciting opportunity to join the Faraday Institution community and be part of the award-winning ReLiB project, helping to usher in the circular economy for lithium-ion and next generation batteries. You will be an enthusiastic champion for sustainability, leading the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and TechnoEconomic Analysis (TEA) research. During the course of this two-year post (with the potential for four years, subject to funding), you will establish a strong academic career in sustainability, at a critical time when the importance of sustainability is widely becoming recognised by academia and industry.

The ReLiB consortium has successfully embedded Life Cycle thinking, highlighting the need for tracking environmental and economic impacts across the project and developing a common understanding of the requirements for quantifying inputs and outputs from all steps within ReLiB processes. In this next phase of the ReLiB project, you will continue to drive this momentum by working closely with the ReLiB experimentalists to gather inventory data for the state-of-the-art direct recycling processes they are developing and giving guidance on how to ensure that the processes are safe and sustainable by design.

You will also take a bigger picture view on the effective recovery of materials from production scrap, not only redesigning the processes to be as sustainable as possible but also considering the suitability of each process to different types of scrap, as well as to end-of-life (EoL) battery materials. In the future, it is expected that scrap rates will diminish as EoL streams grow and synergies between scrap and EoL recycling must therefore be maintained, so that a smooth transition is possible. You will define future scenarios for scrap and EoL waste streams, prioritising the compatibility of scrap recycling processes for EoL streams.

In addition, you will assess the impacts associated with not recovering scrap or other related waste streams, in order to highlight recycling benefits.

For further information please contact Dr. Jacqueline S. Edge (j.s.edge@bham.ac.uk)

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