Rights group condemns electric vehicle batteries

Amnesty International lambasted the electric vehicle industry on Thursday for selling itself as environmentally friendly while producing many of its batteries using polluting fossil fuels and unethically sourced minerals.

Manufacturing batteries could be carbon-intensive, while the extraction of minerals used in them had been linked to human rights violations, such as child labour, the rights group said.

“Electric vehicles are key to shifting the motor industry away from fossil fuels, but they are currently not as ethical as some retailers would like us to believe,” it said, announcing the initiative at the Nordic Electric Vehicle Summit in Oslo.

Production of lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles was power intensive, and factories were concentrated in China, South Korea and Japan, where power generation was largely dependent on coal or other fossil fuels, Amnesty said.

Global car makers are investing billions of dollars to ramp up electric vehicle production.

German giant Volkswagen, for one, plans to raise annual production of electric cars to three million by 2025, from 40,000 in 2018.

Amnesty demanded the industry come up with an ethical and clean battery within five years and, in the meantime, that carbon footprints be disclosed and supply chains of key minerals identified.

In February, a letter showed that 14 nongovernment organisations, including Amnesty and Global Witness, had opposed plans by the London Metal Exchange to ban cobalt tainted by human rights abuses.

Instead of banning the cobalt brands, the LME should work with firms that produced them to ensure responsible sourcing, they said.