## 1 Introduction
Furthermore, it was limited to a battery LCA and did not consider the entire LCA of a vehicle. This paper is the result of part of a research work that was aimed at assessing the environmental footprint of Light-, Medium- and Heavy-Duty Commercial Vehicles equipped with different ICE-based powertrains (running on diesel oil, natural gas, or renewable fuels) and electrified powertrains based on different types of batteries, supercapacitors, or fuel cells. The first part of this research focused on an LDCV for urban and regional freight haulage. Unlike other studies, vehicle production was assessed on the basis of primary data provided by the vehicle manufacturer. These data have been reported in detail in a previous paper [35] in which diesel ICE, Natural Gas ICE, and ZEBRA battery electric vehicles were compared in terms of environmental footprint. The previous analyses of the diesel ICE and ZEBRA battery electric vehicles have been updated for the present paper to consider Ecoinvent version 3.6, and a new electric vehicle, based on an NMC battery, has been added to the analyses. The goal of this study has been twofold: first, the environmental impacts of NMC and ZEBRA batteries have been compared for application to LDCVs on both a mass and an energy basis. The environmental footprint of a case-study LDCV [35] has also been calculated for three different configurations: a conventional vehicle, equipped with a diesel Internal Combustion Engine (ICE), and two BEVs equipped with a ZEBRA and an NMC battery, respectively. The environmental impact results of the LCDV equipped with a ZEBRA battery were taken from a previous paper by the authors [35]. In other words, a complete set of environmental impact categories (see Section 2.1.5 for details) has been considered. The impacts associated with all the life-cycle stages of a product have been estimated, and the recycling phase of the battery components has been modelled through a process adapted to represent the Pyrometallurgic and Hydrometallurgical phases in cascade, as the PEFCR on batteries recommends [26]) The paper is organised as follows: first a detailed description of the adopted LCA methodology is presented, then the results of the LCIs for all the life cycle stages are reported. The result and discussion sections include the cradle-to-grave LCA of an NMC111 battery and insight into the LCA of different NMC chemistries (namely NMC811 and NMC622). The environmental impacts of the manufacturing stages of NMC111 are also compared with those of ZEBRA batteries. Finally, an LCA comparison of three LDCV configurations (NMC111-BEV, ZEBRA-BEV, and conventional diesel), including battery and vehicle production, vehicle maintenance, battery losses, and vehicle use phases, is reported. The main novelties of this article are:  
* A complete Life Cycle Inventory of an NMC battery, which is fully replicable, is presented. * The environmental impact of the NMC battery has been analysed considering all of the product life cycle stages, including the amount of electricity lost during the recharging phase along the lifespan of the battery and the battery EoL. * The recycling phase of the battery components has been analysed, as recommended in the PEFCR on batteries [26], i.e., by modelling the Pyrometallurgic and Hydrometallurgical recycling processes in cascade. These two processes are usually presented in the literature as alternative options for the recycling phase. * An application to electric LDCVs for urban and regional freight haulage has been analysed; most of the papers in the literature have instead focused on passenger cars. * The energy consumption and emissions from the vehicle use phase have been calculated by means of a backward-facing model of the case-study LDCV. * A total of 12 impact categories (listed in Section 2.1.5) have been analysed in the paper. These categories include the global warming potential and Energy Demand, which are the only impact categories that have usually been addressed in most of the studies in the literature.