![]() ![]() “So those haven’t even reached end-of-life yet,” he told me. (Tell that to my Volvo.) The very first EVs with lithium-ion batteries were first sold in 2008. According to Spangenberger, the useful life of a vehicle is about 15 years. With the number of new electric vehicles increasing every year, there simply aren’t enough old batteries available yet to supply the needed minerals. That infinity loop can’t really start for several decades. “You can infinitely recycle these metals.” The work ReCell does is premised on the expectation that someday, most metals in new batteries will come from old batteries. It’s the same cobalt atom when you’re done with recycling,” says Jeff Spangenberger, the head of the ReCell Center in Lemont, Illinois, where industry, academia, and government laboratories collaborate to improve battery-recycling technologies. After those minerals are in circulation, battery recycling should eventually be able to create a nearly closed loop. It was unconscionable.Īnd although the gas my Volvo had burned through was gone forever, the minerals in a battery, in theory, have to be wrested from Mother Earth only once. Nearly 40 years of belching out planet-toasting fumes. I peered at my sweet little Volvo, up on the lift. After about a year of use, depending on the car and the electricity sources in your area, the emissions of a gas-powered car begin to outweigh those extra emissions associated with an EV battery. Of course, once you drive them, electric cars’ lack of ongoing emissions eventually makes them the climate winner. Read: Electric cars still face a major roadblock Because of the emissions associated with making batteries, manufacturing EVs actually releases more greenhouse gases than manufacturing cars with combustion engines. They are supporting an Indigenous-led activist group called People of Red Mountain, which says that the mine would cause “irreversible harm to the Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone Tribe, ancestral massacre sites, water, air, medicines, and culturally important wildlife.”Īnd around the world, the mineral-mining process itself creates greenhouse-gas emissions. Two of my friends, Ka’ila Farrel Smith and her partner, Cale Christi, are fighting the proposed Thacker Pass Lithium Mine, in Nevada. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, some cobalt-mining work is done by children. In Idaho, cobalt is being mined on federal land. In theory, they can be recycled, but they come with a high up-front cost-so high, even, that some people think it’s not worth paying. Like fossil fuels, lithium, cobalt, nickel, and other components must be extracted in large amounts from the Earth. To work, the lithium ions must be moved back and forth between two ends of the battery cell: one typically made of some kind of metal oxide and the other primarily out of graphite. Rechargeable batteries work by popping electrons off lithium atoms, then generating power as they rush through a circuit to reunite with the lithium ions. There is a real tension emerging between environmentalists who are very concerned about the problems associated with the renewable-energy transition and those who see those issues as minor and tractable compared with the ongoing disaster that is the fossil-fuel economy. In particular, batteries in cellphones and electric cars require minerals that have to be mined. These days, the hot slogan among the climate cognoscenti is “Electrify everything.” But electrification has its own environmental impacts. What was I, an environmental journalist, doing burning fossil fuels on the daily just to get to point B? In 2022? It was shameful. In those two days, sitting in the dry High Desert heat in a plastic chair outside the shop, waiting for mechanics to completely replace the ancient fuel lines under my beloved little sedan, I spent a lot of time thinking about buying an electric vehicle. ![]() ![]() It took two days to get a replacement fuel pump. Last month, my 1983 Volvo broke down in a remote part of Oregon. ![]()
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