E-waste blocks the road to green driving
Electric vehicle industry is yet to find an answer to its battery problem, writes
Germany’s courts were witness to a strange row between unlikely enemies last week when Tesla was pitched against a group of environmentalists. Work on the electric car firm’s new German factory was briefly halted after ecowarriors objected to the company cutting down trees.
The protesters were overruled and work resumed — but the case was a reminder that the journey to an electrified future has its own environmental complications.
One of the problems is what we do with the millions of lithium-ion batteries which will power the electric vehicles set to take over our roads.
Professor Jay Whitacre, a trustee professor in energy, engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University, believes this is a “critical situation”.
“I believe now that the infrastructure for dealing with these spent batteries that will be done, at least with their first lifetime, sometime in the next five to 10 years, is not in place at all,” he says.
E-waste in general is already a huge problem. Last year, a UN report concluded that of the 50 million tonnes of electric and electronic waste produced worldwide each year, just 20 per cent was formally recycled.
The e-scooters that have become common sights in many cities are touted by their operators as an answer to air pollution and the climate crisis. Powered by lithiumion batteries, the idea is that they replace car trips and bring down emissions.
While the companies say newer models last much longer, initially the small, light vehicles were lasting as little as a few weeks before succumbing to the elements, being thrown in a body of water or vandalised.
Matthew Chester, an energy analyst, says he has encountered “radio silence” when asking about their sustainability plans.
“It’s frustrating because it’s not that the materials can’t last or the battery can’t be reused. The problem is that the business case is how much would it cost to have somebody go out and repair them; it’s something that could presumably be repaired and recycled but they’re operating on thin margins and trying to beat out the competition,” he says.
“There’s issues with [batteries], there’s issues with anything in a landfill, increasing the amount of stuff we have in a limited amount of landfill.”
Hans Eric Melin, director of London-based consultancy Circular Energy Storage, says current batteries are too valuable to be simply abandoned in large quantities.
In particular, one oft-quoted decade-old figure stating that just 5 per cent of lithiumion batteries are recycled in Europe is “really wrong”, he says. The true figure is closer to 45 per cent.
He says the misconception comes from the fact that many existing batteries are not recycled in Europe or the US but are instead shipped to Asia, so the official collection programmes record very low figures.
“South Korea and China have much more sophisticated processes than we have in the US and Europe, they are able to pay much more for the material. So in America, most of the collectors will sell to Asia, and that is happening in Europe as well.
“And that is the chicken-and-egg story, because it gets harder for the recyclers in Europe and in North America to really build up that capacity and efficiency that is required for them to have the process.”
With a predicted 125 million electric vehicles on the road by 2030, it is far from sustainable for all expired batteries from the US and Europe to be shipped to Asia for recycling. Engineers are also exploring “second-life” uses, where car batteries are used for energy storage, though it’s still unclear how effective or safe this is likely to be.
The dominance of Asia is a sustainability issue as well as a problem for the growing electric car industry in Europe and the US, which is reliant on materials processed and shipped in from abroad. It could also be a national security risk.
Last year, the US Department of Energy announced a US$15 million project to recycle lithium-ion batteries in an attempt to reduce reliance on source countries for the minerals and on the countries that do the bulk of the recycling.
There’s also international pressure to make batteries cheaper and reduce their cobalt content, to make them more widely used and to reduce reliance on mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which have poor safety records and use child labour.
But this could have unintended consequences for the recycling industry, warns Whitacre.
“People are simply trying to design battery materials that don’t need any or need very little cobalt. It went from being 33 per cent cobalt, to 15 per cent cobalt to 10 per cent cobalt, and now they’re talking about 5 per cent, or zero per cent cobalt, just get rid of it. But, of course, cobalt is the most valuable metal in the battery. And so as we get rid of it, we have less impetus to recycle from an economic perspective.”
In 2006, Tesla founder Elon Musk said that “dumping [batteries] in the trash would be throwing money away, since the battery pack can be sold to recycling companies (unsubsidised) at the end of its greater than 100,000-mile design life”.
Tesla says it does not yet have many batteries reaching the end of their lives, but last year announced plans to establish a recycling centre at its Nevada Gigafactory.
Last year, a UN report concluded that of the 50 million tonnes of electric and electronic waste produced worldwide each year, just 20 per cent was formally recycled.