The main journals I read usually have one or two battery papers every issue.
A class that sticks in my mind is sodium sulfur type batteries, but there are many others.
I sometimes skim these papers, but they are not among my chief scientific interests, so I'm not qualified to say what might be cleaner.
A battery is by definition, a device that wastes energy: One can never recover the energy input entirely. The idea that they are environmentally sustainable is absurd on its face, but some batteries are safer than others. The second law of thermodynamics cannot be circumvented.
The environmental impact of lithium battery recycling is easy to ignore, since they are still on the small scale. It is disturbing that people look to them to store otherwise useless so called "renewable energy." This would be a worse environmental disaster than the "renewable energy" itself, which is a pretty awful thought.
I do believe that there is a place where energy storage on a macroscopic scale might be desirable and sustainable; I'm talking on the industrial power plant level. This is in the form of compressed air which, properly utilized can actually recover some energy losses represented by waste heat. It would offer the additional benefit on a very very very large scale of allowing the processing of air to recover and possibly destroy some intractable greenhouse gases, notably the very disturbing gas nitrous oxide, some organofluorides and sulfur fluoride pollutants, and possibly even carbon dioxide.
Chemical batteries, except for portable devices where they are a necessary evil, don't cut it in my view.
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