Everyone knows that electric vehicles are supposed to be better for the planet than gas cars. That’s the driving reason behind a global effort to transition toward batteries.
But what about the harms caused by mining for battery minerals? And coal-fired power plants for the electricity to charge the cars? And battery waste? Is it really true that EVs are better?
The answer is yes. But Americans are growing less convinced.
The net benefits of EVs have been frequently fact-checked, including by NPR. "No technology is perfect, but the electric vehicles are going to offer a significant benefit as compared to the internal combustion engine vehicles," Jessika Trancik, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told NPR this spring.
It’s important to ask these questions about EVs’ hidden costs, Trancik says. But they have been answered “exhaustively” — her word — and a widerange of organizations have confirmed that EVs still beat gas.
So far, the biggest problem with battery recycling is that not enough of it is done locally. Depleted batteries are being shipped to China for recycling.
https://www.npr.org/2024/06/27/nx-s1-5019454/ev-battery-recycling-us
But things are improving here, so that’s good!
Ideally what I’d like to see are large, regional, recycling centers and that’s just not a thing yet. I’d say a minimum of 6, 2 in the West, 2 in the East and 2 in the center of the country.
One of the challenges is, ironically, there aren’t enough dead batteries to economically support multiple large domestic battery recyclers. Batteries aren’t failing enough.
The problem with that model is that when they all start failing it will be a crisis without the infrastructure to solve for it.
What crisis are you foreseeing? It is unlikely its going to be an avalanche of millions of batteries failing at once needing processing. Wear and tear will spread final failure over a long time horizon.
Piles of spent batteries stacking up leaking heavy metals into the envirionment without a large scale plan to deal with them.
A single EV uses a 1,000 pound battery pack (on average):
https://blog.evbox.com/ev-battery-weight
That’s a LOT to properly dispose of. x 3.3 million EVs in use in the US?
https://www.edmunds.com/electric-car/articles/how-many-electric-cars-in-us.html
3.3 BILLION pounds of future battery waste. We need to plan for proper recycling now.
So again, you’re describing an avalanche type event where all this need for recycling appears overnight, and that without it we’ll have massive environmental damage. Neither of those is likely to occur like that.
Small numbers of batteries will outright fail or be destroyed in crashes becoming useless immediately. This will increase in a fairly predictable way giving lots of indications about needed recycling infrastructure (of which some exists today). Further, the time horizon for larger numbers of batteries to become unusable is likely decades away. Batteries that degrade from use don’t stop working, but rather become uneconomical to continue to use them in cars and they be come stationary energy storage, like this:
Old Nissan LEAF Batteries Being Used For Grid-Scale Storage In California
Your source links don’t support your argument well. The first just talks about how much a car battery weighs with no mention of recycling, life span, or disposal, and you even posted an inaccurate number from your article on the weight impact of the battery materials. You said:
…but your source says this: "On average, about 60 to 75 percent of a battery’s total weight comes from the cells and the materials they contain, while the remaining 25 to 40 percent is made up of the battery’s metal casing, cables, and thermal and battery management systems (TMS and BMS). "
So the weight of the material you’re citing as dangerous is only 600 lbs to 750 lbs, not the 1000lbs you mention.
Your second link also doesn’t contain any info on battery usage, degradation, recycling, or disposal, and is just an article talking about the number of cars on the road. It looks like you just took the first sentence from that link which was:
"According to an Experian Automotive Market Trends report from the fourth quarter of 2023, there were about 3.3 million electric cars on the road in the U.S. "
…which you then multiplied by the incorrectly heavy metal battery number from your prior article
…to arrive at your statement…
That’s an unnecessary and inaccurate scare tactic.
Yes we will need more capacity for disposing of batteries properly, but the problem at scale is decades away, not tomorrow. Further, the materials themselves are valuable long after any energy storage capacity is exhausted. They are too valuable to throw away. Legislation already passed is working to create a market for this by offering tax incentives in the USA for batteries built from recycled battery material in the USA. This is in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Here’s an actual source that talks about EV battery degradation, lifespan, and recycling. source
“Then there’s the Inflation Reduction Act, also passed in 2022, which grants US taxpayers a federal tax credit on the purchase of a new EV. The act stipulates that a certain percentage of the materials used to create those vehicles must be mined or processed in the United States. This puts pressure on EV manufacturers to step up domestic EV battery recycling.”
So again, I’m not seeing the crisis you are.
It’s basic math, 1,000 pound battery packs x 3.3 million current vehicles.
We do have some local recycling, but nothing at that scale and the batteries have a 15 to 20 year lifespan.
Tesla was around 2008 so by 2028 we need to have a plan for mass recycling. Maybe sooner because I’m sure those 2008 batteries are pushing it by now.
While I was poking around I found this, on Lithium Ion battery recycling:
Pathway decisions for reuse and recycling of retired lithium-ion batteries considering economic and environmental functions https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-52030-0
Abstract Reuse and recycling of retired electric vehicle (EV) batteries offer a sustainable waste management approach but face decision-making challenges. Based on the process-based life cycle assessment method, we present a strategy to optimize pathways of retired battery treatments economically and environmentally. The strategy is applied to various reuse scenarios with capacity configurations, including energy storage systems, communication base stations, and low-speed vehicles. Hydrometallurgical, pyrometallurgical, and direct recycling considering battery residual values are evaluated at the end-of-life stage. For the optimized pathway, lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries improve profits by 58% and reduce emissions by 18% compared to hydrometallurgical recycling without reuse. Lithium nickel manganese cobalt oxide (NMC) batteries boost profit by 19% and reduce emissions by 18%. Despite NMC batteries exhibiting higher immediate recycling returns, LFP batteries provide superior long-term benefits through reuse before recycling. Our strategy features an accessible evaluation framework for pinpointing optimal pathways of retired EV batteries.
That’s because there’s not yet enough EV installed base to drive demand for recycled batteries.
Is Redwood Materials shipping things overseas? They seem to be the big car battery recycler the automakers are signing up with.
They have a very good map on the production end, showing where metals are sourced and refined, then cathodes produced in Japan and sent over, but I’m not seeing anything similar on the recycling side.
https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/#problem