Powering Micromobility Responsibly: A PRISMA-Guided Assessment for Battery Sustainability Across Environment, Society, and Economy

Abstract

The global shift toward electric micromobility and electric vehicles is accelerating rapidly, with the micromobility market projected to grow from EUR 7.49 billion in 2025 to EUR 18.94 billion by 2031. This transition is driven by the need to decarbonize transport, reduce congestion and comply with emerging zero-emission regulations. However, while this transition substantially reduces operational emissions, they introduce complex sustainability challenges associated with raw material extraction, battery manufacturing and end-of-life management. Lithium-ion traction batteries, especially high-performance chemistries depend on critical raw materials like lithium, nickel and cobalt, whose extraction poses both environmental and ethical concerns. These issues a re intensified by supply-chain concentration, geopolitical risks and high energy demands during battery production. This systematic literature review, conducted using PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) methodology and screening 1037 records to identify 45 relevant studies, synthesizes the current state of sustainability research on electric micromobility batteries. The review highlights key lifecycle hotspots in production, the potential of end-of-life strategies, such as second-life applications and advanced recycling, to mitigate environmental burdens and the growing need for robust social and resource-criticality assessments. The novelty of this review lies in linking a PRISMA-based dataset with thematic analysis to ensure methodological traceability, while systematically comparing Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), Life Cycle Costing (LCC), and social-Life Cycle Assessment (SLCA) approaches and integrating insights across environmental, economic, and social dimensions to identify cross-cutting sustainability trade-offs in battery systems. The study identifies key gaps, including the under-representation of social risks, fragmented life-cycle circularity assessments, insufficient consideration of critical raw material constraints, lack of robust quantification of end-of-life credits, and the limited number of studies specifically addressing micromobility applications involving lithium batteries below 2 kWh and 48 V capacity. The review aims to provide a comprehensive synthesis of battery sustainability across the full value chain, highlight methodological limitations and knowledge gaps.