Along with the massive recent manufacturing investments in electric vehicle (EV) technology and talks of a greener, decarbonized future, there are some not-so-green problems.
In its latest New Energy Finance report, Bloomberg News predicts there will be some 730 million EVs on the road by 2040. The year before, Bloomberg predicted half of all U.S. vehicle sales would be battery electric by 2030.
In Canada, too, there’s talk of a big economic boost with the transition to EVs — including 250,000 jobs and $48 billion a year added to the nation’s economy through the creation of a domestic supply chain.
Governments have already invested tens of billions into two EV battery manufacturing plants in southwestern Ontario. However, they come with the environmental dilemma of what to do with the millions of EV batteries when they reach the end of their life.
“The rules are non-existent,” said Mark Winfield, a professor at York University in Toronto and co-chair of the school’s Sustainable Energy Initiative. "There is nothing as we talk to agencies on both sides of the border, the federal, provincial, state levels.
“In the case of Ontario, the answer was actually that we have no intention of doing anything about this.”
Actually it seems to be one of the more talked about aspects, right after the local environmental costs of mining in some poorer countries, dispite being one of the easiest to solve.
You drop EV batteries into a dielectric bath industrial crusher and get thousands of dollars of absurdly high grade lithium-cobalt ore out of it. While there are hard questions that industry has not put much public press into answering, especially when it comes to environmental concerns, in this case the reason is that it’s actually pretty trivial to deal with.
Given that lead acid batteries have a ninety seven percent capture rate dispite only being worth a few dozen dollars at most, we can expect higher rates with the far more valuable EV batteries. Lithium is infinitely recyclable after all, and for all the failings of the free market when it comes to keeping personal electronic’s batteries out of landfills I doubt you need much overarching regulation to get people to take the five to seven thousand dollar payout from recycling in this case.
The reason we don’t see high recycling rates currently in the space is that despite worries that the batteries would degrade to the point of uselessness after a few short years, the vast majority of EVs are still on the road and looking to have a longer average lifespan than gasoline vehicles. On top of that there are a lot of applications which want the reuse them and there is a reason that reduce, reuse, recycle are in that order.
And of course, any talk of the environmental impacts of EVs has to be caveated by the fact that 60 to 70 percent of an EVs emissions cost comes from the power grid itself, which is rapidly changing as renewables push out more expensive coal and natural gas. Of the remainder, most of it is in mining the raw material for the battery itself, which as mentioned only has to be paid once before it is recycled for quite potentially forever.
Unlike a gas car which on average produces more than twice their weight in co2 every single year it’s on the road, an EVs emissions break even after only two to four years, after which that car and its future descendants will continue to just go mile after mile without contributing to gobal environmental collapse.
While things like more of Vancouver’s trolleybus network would obviously be best, given the population densities involved as well as the housing shortage we’re not going to be able to replace all cars in North America on the timelines the laws of physics demand we meet, and it’s important to keep that in mind when discussing it.
Well said!
Whenever I read something like that, I can’t help thinking of my son, who has paid zero attention to any advance since first hearing about the EV-1 or some shill with an agenda.
Personally, I’d love to have a business taking batteries no longer fit for purpose in cars and building off-grid wind and solar systems. That’ll never happen, though, because at 67 I’m too old to ever see used batteries in enough volume to justify trying it.
My personal opinion is that the need for large scale recycling is still decades away. If a vehicle’s battery pack isn’t completely physically damaged, it is more likely to end it’s life in use for stationary power or split into smaller packs for short range, occasional use vehicles, like boats, ATVs, small farm and yard equipment, and, of course, golf carts and “city cars”.
They don’t use Lithium Cobalt Oxide anymore.
Not exclusively, but unfortunately in North America a lot of marketing has been put into maximum range, and so lithium iron phosphate is still in the minority of market volume becuse of the thirty percent volume penalty. Things are better in China with the larger focus on budget options, and they even have a sodium vehicle now on the market, but to my knowledge lithium cobalt still makes up the majority of North American EVs, in volume sold if not in models.
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But no one wants that
Housing prices in walkable urban neighborhoods say otherwise. The reality is that there’s huge demand for dense, walkable urban places. But the NIMBYs, car companies, and fossil fuel companies don’t want that.
There’s a lot of people who do want to live in dense neighborhoods, enough to drive up prices fighting over the tiny supply, but from a whole population point of view it’s a minority. Politicians still listen exclusively to the suburbanites. Even in the dense neighborhoods, the NIMBYs are listened to more than anyone wanting our cities to look more like Europe or (the good parts of) Asia.
If you actually travel to and experience a city with great public transportation it’s mind boggling the nonsense we deal with in car centric cities. It’s just so inefficient having every person in their own individual vehicle. So must space is wasted on highways, parking lots, parking garages, etc.
That’s one thing self driving cars will help with. There won’t be as much of a need for individual cars when you can just have one pick you up whenever.
That’s a good idea. What if instead of one self driving car for each person, you had a larger self driving vehicle that picked up lots of people? You could put it on a set route so you know which car to catch a ride with, and you can even dedicate specific sections of the road for these vehicles. Heck, you could even have that set route go underground, or above ground.
…and we’ve just reinvented public transportation.
The difference is that self driving cars would be an on demand thing. With public transportation you have to rely on their schedule, and not everywhere has stops, so you’d still have to travel to get there.
Each person having their own individual vehicle that takes them directly to where they want to go is the MOST efficient method of transport, the only thing better would be each person having their own helicopter.
I don’t think it is fair to say no one wants that because few people today have been able to experience good public transit and walkability, and those that have often have to pay a premium in housing to experience it because those devlopments are scarce.
There is an environmental cost to nearly everything — but the cost for virtually everything related to EVs is significantly less than those of ICE vehicles, especially in a country like Canada where over 80% of our electricity is from hydroelectric sources, and over 90% of it is from non-carbon-emitting sources.
Yes, the batteries (today) need lithium. That’s not likely to be true moving into the future — China is already releasing an 2024 model based on a sulphur battery. However, what many people (and this article) conveniently ignore is that ICE vehicles use rare-earth metals as well. For example, very ICE vehicle uses palladium (one of the rarest metals on earth) for the catalytic converter — a rare earth metal not required in EV production. And Russia produces 40% of the global supply of palladium.
And oil refining uses cobalt as part of the de-sulphuring process. A lot of cobalt. Over its lifetime the average ICE vehicle will use more cobalt than any EV being manufactured today.
EV batteries are recyclable — up to 95% recyclable. But even before disposal is needed, used EV batteries can be repurposed — Nissan in Japan already resells Leaf batteries with >80% capacity as home backup and camping power packs, and elsewhere in the world used EV batteries are finding a new life as solar power generation storage. Sourcing lithium from used EV batteries cells is vastly more economical than mining for new lithium, so we’ll likely hit a steady-state where only minimal mining is required for new EVs. EV battery recycling is somewhat nascent right now as the oldest EVs are barely 12 years old, and many of those are still on the road.
The worries about the environmental cost of EVs is vastly overstated — especially when you set them side-by-side with ICE vehicles. Anyone who unabashedly drives an ICE vehicle but then complains about how polluting EVs are is being completely disingenuous.
Nissan in Japan already resells Leaf batteries with >80% capacity as home backup and camping power packs
A buddy of mine is desperately working with grid-scale green energy companies to integrate second-life batteries into their production, to smooth out demand on the grid.
Now do public transit
Exactly, instead of comparing EVs to ICEVs we should compare them to public transit.
If every dollar spent on EVs was being put into LRTs and regional rail where would we be?
Yeah we need cars in rural areas, but that’s not where most people live.
It’s not an either-or situation; we’ll always need a mix of transit capabilities.
Besides which, transit has many of the same issues, and benefits from the same technologies. We need to remove diesel and gas busses, trams, and trains from the roads as well, often using much the same technologies the anti-EV crowd puts down passenger EVs for.
Everything I stated for why EVs are better for the environment goes for electric driven public transit too.
Actually, it very much is an either or situation. Either we drastically reduce our consumption, and start using public transportation, or we pollute ourselves to death trying to give every human a car.
You can’t have public transportation that takes everyone everywhere they need (or want) to be. Ever order food delivery? You can’t do that by bus or train. Would you expect the Presidential motorcade to switch to getting on a subway? Do you expect every plumber, electrician, landscaper, and handyman who needs a van or truck to haul their equipment from home to home to do repairs just bring 10 guys on the bus with them?
We’ll still need passenger vehicles, full stop. Should we design cities and transit so that we need less of them? Sure — but it’s impossible to replace all of them, as public-option transport just can’t do everything we use passenger vehicles for today. Public transit is only about moving people, but sometimes those people need to drag equipment around with them, or need additional security, or have need to go somewhere where dedicated transit options aren’t financially viable — and for those cases, we still need non-polluting passenger vehicles.
I predict neither will happen.
Well, non-polluting passenger vehicles are happening, and here in Canada by 2035 all passenger vehicles sold will (at a minimum) need to be PHEVs that can travel up to 80km on a single battery charge.
Unless of course idiot voters bring in a Conservative government, and they remove the certainty the Liberal government has given automakers around EV sales in Canada.
I don’t have high hopes for the future. We are going to emit a fuck ton of CO2 to extract all the rare earth minerals, in order to replace the insane fleet of passenger vehicles in the world, and in doing so, lock in our fate.
Other than a socialist wave that destroys our culture of consumerism and capitalism, I don’t see us pulling out of the nose dive.
EVs really just look like greenwashing car centric design when compared to transit.
That’s why our society is fucked and we deserve to crumble. Instead of real solutions, they just focused to something else they can sell us…
what to do with the millions of EV batteries when they reach the end of their life.
4 seconds of googling will show you they’re recyclable. They go back into the food chain right after “mineral refinement”, which they already tout as a risky thing we should source alternatively if we can. It’s like oil cowboys can be So Close to a solution and not figure it out.
They are recyclable, and the government has a plan to force manufacturers to actually pay to recycle them?
Because otherwise it means nothing.
Recycling lithium batteries is cheaper than mining then refining lithium ore. That’s true of most metals, it’s less true for glass because the material is so readily available, and plastic recycling is a scam top to bottom.
You’re right about recycling metals and plastics. I swear I read somewhere though that recycled glass is “purer”, and that the first few cycles happen right at the factory. They’ll make a batch of glass, immediately destroy it, and recycle it until they get their desired threshold of purity.
EVs are not a climate solution. You still get most of the negatives of ICE cars. However, the development of the technology is still needed. We need better battery tech. We need to figure out how to recharge batteries and how to manage their wastes.
When it comes to transport, the greenest solutions are centralized, as they substantially reduce demand of materials.the problem with centralized transportation, is that until you get it to the point where you have 24/7 coverage with small wait windows, people will still prefer a car. Why wait for a bus, when I can turn the key and go? Bonus, I don’t have to deal with people or transfer.
The negatives of ICE cars and EVs are not comparable. EVs are an important solution against climate change, ICE pollutes much more. One lithium battery is not the same as literally 10 years of directly burning oil, the rest of the car takes the same ressources to build in both cases.
Daily reminder that “batteries are the devil and EVs pollute just as much as ICE” is pure oil industry propaganda.
You’re missing my point. EVs do provide some value in their immediate offset of Carbon. No question. My point is that on a broader scale, unless we REDUCE OUR DEMAND for individual transportation, and have systems in place that can replace that need, any solution we offer is going to be hugely environmentally detrimental. if 100 people need 100 cars to live, that’s still 100 cars we have to produce. If 100 people can get by on 3 busses and 15 EV scooters, we are better off.
No, I’m correcting you on things that you are presenting as ground truths. I’m not missing anything, my comment only pertains to your two first sentences which are completely false.
You can make your point without lying and being a mouthpiece for the oil industry.
More vitriol please.
How are they false? You still need metal, rubber, and plastics to make an EV, in similar quantities to create cars, because you are creating cars. There is an environmental impact associated with this.
As I said, you certainly get the C offset due to not burning fuel, and definitely helps, but it’s not a be all end all solution.
As I continue to say, we need a holistic approach to the climate crisis, without oil.
I don’t know why you think I’m a o&g mouthpiece, when I would happily watch those companies and Petro states beg for alms down by the river.
EVs aren’t perfect but they certainly are much better imo.
A car free society is 100% the end goal but we need to transition through EVs, we simply can’t cling on to gas any longer. It’s going to take too long to switch for us to just ignore the impact gas has on our environment while we do so.
Both types of vehicle have their manufacturing environmental costs but there is a vast difference between the cost of a lithium battery and literally taking oil and burning it. Presenting both as having the same environmental cost is precisely the type of misinformation the oil companies are peddling.
EVs only really fix the tail pipe emissions and replace that problem with battery disposal.
Just focusing on EVs still require car centric design which wastes urban space on parking lots, promotes urban sprawl instead of density, creates toxic dust from the tires, requires energy to clear roads of snow (often includes salting the earth), and will wear out roads at a faster rate than ICE cars due to the EVs higher weight.
Yes some people will need EVs and we should develop them for those people, but building walkable cities and reliable public transit would do far more for reducing carbon/energy usage.
The battery disposal problem is on the cusp of becoming the battery recycling industry.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-li-cycle-lithium-ion-battery-recycling-industry/
Eating lunch only really fixes your hunger problem and replaces that problem with a poop problem.
Problems can be more or less hard. :P
I’d argue EVs are a solution, just not the ones the government is subsidizing.
Electric bikes and micro-mobility punch way about their weight, but are still considered niche.
If we prioritized bike lanes the same way we prioritize car lanes e-bikes would at least be playing on the same field.
I’d argue that the techs been here for at least a decade. In modern production EVs the only negatives are that while on a road trip you have to stop every two and a half hours for a whole twenty minutes and arguably price, through the latter is mostly just a North American thing. Better a minor inconvenience now than a perfect solution after the last coral dies.
As for mining, Australia’s lithium mines arn’t much different than any other major mines, much less the drilling and fracking needed to supply the constant consumption of gasoline and diesel vehicles.
As much as trollybuses and overhead electric trains are definitely the best solution for urban and suburban transportation, where they can and do bear cars even from a speed, comfort, and convenience standpoint, we can’t reasonably expect to relocate everyone in Canada to urban areas, and even if we did you would still need hundreds of thousands to millions of vehicles for transport, delivery, emergency, etc.
Even the small “carless” villages of Switzerland still need custom small electric vehicles, and Canada requires far longer ranges than small villages that were never connected to the road network.
As long as any of that holds true, your going to need smaller than bus vehicles, and battery electric remand the best option, and thusly I would argue that they are indeed a climate solution. Not the solution, but a solution. We could never replace what has been the foundation of the industrial world with a single alternative. There is simply too much that would need to be covered for a one size fits all solution.
I’m not suggesting a one size fits all. Individual + centralized is the way to go vs. JUST one or the other
Was this written by saudi arabia?
This is something you can google. It’s been talked about to death. Even in the worst energy mix countries EVs still beats gas on emissions during the cars lifetime
Who need the Saudi’s when Canada is the fifth largest oil producer in the world and shares the majority of its infrastructure with first place just down south.
On emissions, yes.
On recyclability, no.
Ev batteries are recyclable. Not sure why you keep saying they aren’t. Oil and gas certainly aren’t recyclable.
The Used Oil Management Association of Canada (UOMA) and National Used Oil Material and Antifreeze Advisory Council (NUOMAAC) work together to coordinate the recycling of used oil and antifreeze materials, as well as oil filters and related containers, across the country. Nine industry-led provincial stewardship programs work in close collaboration to achieve environmental, economic and socio-economic successes on behalf of our members and all Canadians. Source
Recycle the gas burned in your car. I’ll wait.
Show me where I said anything about gas.
I’ll wait.
Right here…
On emissions, yes.
On recyclability, no.<
In context with the previous comment, it implies that you believe an ICE car is more recycleable than an EV.
Good point!
It’s an okay point. Yes, the oil you must change every so often can be recycled. But I’m sure we’re talking about the other oil, that is, gasoline, which is absolutely not recyclable. The other poster is probably an oil and coal shill.
We can cheaply recycle gasoline now?
We can recycle oil (and have since the 70’s). We also recycle vehicles with full frames (unibodies are more difficult) and engines.
EVs are not recyclable (yet, anyway) and are written off with far less damage (essentially unrepairable at low-speed impact accidents).
Key word was cheaply, current costs if synthetic fuels are two to four times the current market rate at best, not available to the public, and heavily limited in their inability to scale within the necessary timeframe.
Any vehicle’s metal components can be scraped and recycled, and if your talking about component reuse EVs have far, far fewer consumable parts as compared to ICEs. While you can rebuild an engine with all new consumables, we’ve also been rewiring motors for just as long, and indeed the motor has far fewer wear items that require a rebuild in the first place. Indeed given the thriving conversation space and its demand for EV parts, they are often more recycled than all but classic models of ICE. EV batteries have proven trivial to recycle, and the frame and such are practically identical to ICE versions.
The majority of plastics are single use and a landfilled, and are just as prevalent in ICE’s as EVs.
The higher rate of write offs for minor incidents is consistent across many new vehicles, and is more a case of insurers lacking a large dataset from which to draw stats from than any inherent technological factor.
Doesn’t recycling oil require that you still have the oil in oil form?
Oil is oil. It’s either dirty or clean. Recycling it removes the dirt, and while that in no way makes it functional as a lubricant for newer engines it can be used for other manufacturing processes or be used in different products, ie: asphalt.
Do you think that lithium batteries aren’t recyclable? If so, I have some news for you…
EV = electric vehicles. I am referencing the whole vehicle, not just the battery.
Then why would you assume the whole vehicle can’t be recycled? They’re made out of metal and plastic like ICEVs
Because right now recycling of plastics in end-of-life vehicles (ELVs) is low because of mixed composites and few markets …
About 1.6 million vehicles are retired annually in Canada, and each of these ELVs contain about 175 kg of various plastic resins. Recycling rates for the plastics in ELVs tend to be low since there are very few end markets for these materials. Plastics from ELVs are often contaminated with other plastics and metal components, and there are not currently technologies capable of recycling all of the different plastic and multi-resin parts found in vehicles. Source
EV plastic and body recycling will be even less because of the need for composite construction in unibody design to keep the weight down, to compensate for the battery weight. Right now EVs are 1000+ lbs heavier than traditional ICE vehicles.
These guys seem to think they’re recyclable
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-li-cycle-lithium-ion-battery-recycling-industry/
EVs are the vehicles themselves, not the batteries.
I want to see a better world and less pollution, but this is a discussion that has to happen. It needs to happen now. The clock is ticking. We are going to start seeing a ton of batteries that we need to somehow dispose of.
It also helps us prioritize the better batteries (efficiency, long lasting, disposal, recycling)
Exactly.
And some schmuck just down voted me for saying I want a better world lol
It’s funny how governments rush to help private corporations when it comes to veggies, but absolutely DON’T want to spend a penny when it’s about public transit infrastructure.
Quebec, for example, just gave over $7 BILLION of our tax dollars to a foreign company for building an EV lithium ion battery manufacture on a piece of land they said was protected wetlands a couple years prior.
Meanwhile, Quebec city is asking for less than half of that to build a much needed electric tramway.
We don’t even know if future EVs will still use these kinds of batterie as we have solid sodium or aluminum ion batteries with better performance and range coming soon.
If anyone’s worried about the environment, start by banning large pickup trucks for private individuals or big ass SUVs or old diesels.
Is it really accurate to say we spend nothing on transit? Maybe it isn’t as much as you’d want, but there are definitely billions going into Transit funding.
If anything, the government of Quebec is cutting funding for public transportation. Montréal was forced to reduce their employees, reduced bus services, and even talked about reducing metro operation hours to save money due to the cuts.
The battery components are very much recyclable.
It’s about 95% recyclable (and that is expected to continue improving). It is truely recyclable (it can be done infinitely with no downcycling) and most importantly (unfortunately) is it highly profitable to recycle them.
Why is recycling being profitable an unfortunate thing?
It’s unfortunate that it is the most important thing.
Right. And how are we doing to manage that recyclable waste? If it’s as bad as for l how we manage household recyclables, we’re in deep shit.
As the battery components are valuable the recycling is pretty effective. The problem with household recycling is that there is no economic value for most of our waste.
They don’t talk about it because until a few years back petrol and diesel were the only options.
Batteries are better than oil hands-down. The impact of any extraction is going to be non zero, until such time our research finds reliable, renewable, and non-polluting source of energy. You think we should stick to oil because the other options are only marginally better?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Along with the massive recent manufacturing investments in electric vehicle (EV) technology and talks of a greener, decarbonized future, there are some not-so-green problems.
In Canada, too, there’s talk of a big economic boost with the transition to EVs — including 250,000 jobs and $48 billion a year added to the nation’s economy through the creation of a domestic supply chain.
"You would think given the nature of these products and also the scale of the potential looming problem, as you know, when the EV sales move into the tens of millions and every one of those ultimately is going to result in an end-of-life battery.
If the country carries through on its plan to build a home-grown supply chain for the critical minerals needed to make EV batteries, it could mean the development of a vast tract of unspoiled nature in Ontario’s north.
For years, Scott has studied the social, environmental and legal implications of bringing development to the Hudson’s Bay Lowlands and its effect on the rights and interests of remote Indigenous communities there.
While it’s impossible to tell who’s right, Scott said governments need buy-in from every First Nation in the Treaty 9 area or any development would be open to litigation — some rarely mentioned at news conferences or funding announcements about the upcoming switch to Canadian-made EV batteries.
The original article contains 795 words, the summary contains 204 words. Saved 74%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
