## 4 Discussion  
The main findings of this paper pertaining to the LCA of the NMC111 battery and to the LCA of the three configurations of the case study LDCV are compared in this section with those reported in the literature. With reference to the cradle-to-grave life cycle assessment of the NMC111 battery reported in Figure 5, the battery production stage is the main contributor to all the considered impacts. Indeed, with the exception of the ODP, the battery production contribution is always above 60%. This is in line with the results published in the literature (see for instance, [43]). In other words, cathode production makes the largest contribution to all of the examined environmental impact categories, with the exception of ODP, ADP-FF, GWP, and CED. In fact, although the greatest impacts in ODP are attributed to cell recycling, GWP and the CED electricity and heat necessary for the production stage are the main contributors to ADP-FF. No study in the literature has analysed such a wide set of impact categories for NNC111, and most of the available analyses have focused on GWP. The GWP estimated in this paper is consistent with the study conducted by [19], in which GHG emissions, due to the electrical consumption of an NMC battery during manufacturing in China, accounted for 35% of the total GHG emissions. The contribution of the production of non-cell materials to battery production is less than 30% for all the impact categories, except for ADP, CED, ADP-FF, and GWP, in which the production of non-cell materials accounts for 36%, 41%, 42%, and 46%, respectively. Figure 10: Comparison of the impact categories for NMC111-BEV, with an additional battery pack and the production location in Europe, with ZEBRA-BEV and DIE-ICEV. The impacts were normalised to the highest score in each category. This is in line with the results reported in [18], in which the production of non-cell materials had a greater impact on ADP-FF, GWP, and ODP (the latter has also shown less impact in our study, accounting for only 19%), whereas CED and ADP were not investigated. These outcomes confirm the importance of taking into account the impacts of battery production for both cell and non-cell materials when assessing the environmental sustainability of electric mobility [43]. Table 6 (adapted from [11]) compares the GWP results of this study with those available in the literature for production and recycling stages. The observed differences are mainly due to different battery compositions, locations, data sources, and energy demands. The works of [PERSON] et al. [19] and [PERSON] et al. [51] were similar to this study, as far as location and battery composition are concerned, but the data sources were different (mainly based on GREET [52]. The studies of [PERSON] et al. [22] and of [PERSON] et al. [18] are comparable with this study as far as energy demand is concerned, but the production locations were different and different assumptions were made about the battery composition. In our study, battery losses, with reference to the battery use phase, have had a great impact on T-ECOTP, CED, EP, and ODP (25%, 19%, 17%, 17%, respectively). This outcome appears to be in line with [43], in which the battery losses were more significant for CED, GWP, EP, ODP (Ref. [43] did not analyse T-ECOTP). Excluding the battery use stage, which is dependent to a great extent on the operating conditions, the GWP of the NMC111 battery is 20.2 kgCO2 eq/kgbatterypack and 130.4 kgCO2 eq/kWh. The impact of cell recycling results in 9.7 kgCO2 eq/kWh, while it increases to 11.3 kgCO2 eq/kWh when non cell-material cycling is also considered. The transport of batteries contributes less than 1% to all the examined categories. A literature study of the different assessments of NMC battery production, published by the Swedish Energy Agency [53], reports a maximum GWP of 146 kgCO2 eq/kWh for manufacturing and of 15 kgCO2 eq/kWh for recycling, values which appear to be comparable with the outcomes of our study.