Circular Investment Risk, Cost, Uncertainty, Impact, and Traceability (CIRCUIT-5): An Evidence-Governed Framework for Robust Techno-Economic and Environmental Screening of Lithium-Ion Battery Recycling

Abstract Circular-economy investments require decisions that reconcile economic feasibility, environmental performance, uncertainty, and the credibility of supporting evidence. However, conventional techno-economic and environmental screening approaches rarely distinguish changes arising from competing objectives, input sensitivity, and numerical evidence deficiencies. This study develops CIRCUIT-5, a reproducible five-stage computational framework integrating source-data auditing, techno-economic and environmental assessment, multiobjective trade-off analysis, robustness testing, and evidence-governed screening. Using 18,198 published model-generated lithium-ion battery recycling records covering 337 Chinese cities, six battery chemistries, and nine model years, four screening configurations were evaluated across 3,033 city–year choice sets. Spatial Pareto analysis, carbon-valuation switching thresholds, and assumption-based perturbation experiments were subsequently examined across 54 chemistry–year groups. Results reveal that economic and integrated cost–GHG screening produced identical chemistry selections, whereas minimum-cost and minimum-emission cities differed in all 54 spatial groups. Selecting the minimum-emission endpoint required a median processing-cost premium of 18.33% while reducing modelled GHG emissions by 35.38%. The median first-switch carbon valuation was USD 72.48/tCO₂e, with 44 of 54 groups changing their preferred city at USD 100/tCO₂e. Under ±5%, ±10%, and ±20% input perturbations, mean selection stability declined to 14.53%, 8.50%, and 4.42%, respectively. All seven controlled evidence-gate tests passed, and 12 published industrial LCA totals were independently reproduced arithmetically. CIRCUIT-5 contributes an evidence-aware, uncertainty-sensitive screening framework that distinguishes objective alignment, environmental trade-offs, and ranking robustness, providing a reproducible foundation for preliminary circular-investment assessment.