Ni and Co in refinement products for subsequent manufacturing can be discrete salts (1 and 3) or mixed compounds (2, 4, and 5). Refining lithium-ion batteries into battery-grade materials exhibits lower environmental impacts than production from mined natural materials. The upstream steps of material extraction and transport are considered in later sections. Environmental impacts including energy consumption, greenhouse gas emissions (CO2-equivalents, CO2-eq; additional criteria air pollutants are detailed in Table ) and water consumption of refinement pathways in conventional and circular LIB supply chains are compared in Fig. for the gate-to-gate production of battery-grade cathode materials. State-of-the-art conventional pathways generating discrete salts (Method (1) in Fig. ) are analyzed here. One kg of lithium-nickel-cobalt-aluminum-oxide cathode-equivalent material (NCA-eq) is employed as a functional unit throughout this study for supply chain comparison, accounting for the elemental requirements to produce stoichiometric LiNi0.80Co0.15Al0.05O2. NCA chemistry is selected for the functional unit because it comprises the second-largest category of EV battery chemistries following NMC batteries , and is projected to utilize less Co compared to NMC . Excluding the environmental impacts of material extraction and transport steps, the gate-to-gate production of one kg NCA-eq battery-grade material from conventional mined natural materials consumes 193.9 MJ and 77.3 L H2O while emitting 14.5 kg CO2-eq (Fig. ). The values of energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions are comparable with previous studies based on GREET datasets (Fig. ). Refinement of mined material concentrate into battery-grade Ni material dominates NCA environmental impacts, representing >57% of total values. note that Al is presented on the top of the stacked bars but its contributions are too small to be seen; however specific environmental impacts of each element contributor are detailed in Table .