The electric car industry is in the balance of sustainability
The electric car industry is in the balance of sustainability
Around the world, automakers and governments are promoting electric vehicles as a key technology for reducing fossil fuel use and combating climate change. For example, we find the American auto giant General Motors planning to stop selling new gasoline-powered cars – as well as small trucks – by 2035, while switching to electric options, which is the same policy that most car manufacturers around the world are now pursuing.
But the question that arises with the increasing growth of electric vehicles is, is this industry really as environmentally friendly as it is promoted?
Although experts widely agree thatelectric vehiclesare a more climate-friendly option than traditional gasoline or diesel-powered vehicles, they can still cause negative environmental impacts, depending on how they are charged with electricity and how they are manufactured. Therefore, in the following lines, we will discuss some of the fears about this industry.
Where does electricity come from?
In general, most electric cars sold today tend to produce much lower emissions than most gasoline-powered cars, but what we should not overlook here is that the electricity with which these cars are charged comes from power plants, which are – perhaps – powered by coal or diesel; Therefore, electric cars indirectly cause an increase in emissions, especially since electricity networks still have a long way to go before becoming environmentally friendly.
Therefore, reducing the use of fossil fuels – especially coal – in power plants will play a major role in making electric cars environmentally friendly, otherwise the result will only be more emissions, but from the smokestacks of power plants instead of cars.
The good news – regarding electric cars – is that most countries are now taking serious steps towards improving their electrical networks to be clean. These steps include: disabling many coal plants over the past decade, and gradually shifting to relying on a combination of low-emission natural gas, wind and solar energy; Therefore, researchers found that electric cars have a lower carbon footprint, and it is expected that this footprint will decrease further in the future.
The reason why electric cars are an attractive climate solution is that if we can make electricity grids carbon-neutral – their emissions will be much lower, compared to conventional cars and even hybrid cars, both of which have a significant carbon footprint.
The issue of raw materials in electric cars
As we know, electric cars operate using large lithium-ion batteries. Like many other batteries, the manufacture of lithium-ion cells relies on many raw materials, such as cobalt, lithium, and rare earth elements, which has been linked to serious environmental and human rights concerns, especially cobalt.
Cobalt mining produces hazardous waste that can leak into the environment, and studies have confirmed the presence of negative impacts in communities adjacent to places where cobalt and other metals are mined, especially among children, as extracting metals from their ores requires a process called smelting, which can emit gases such as sulfur oxide, which particularly pollutes the air.
Up to 70% of the world’s cobalt supply is extracted from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a large percentage produced by one country in the developing world, which necessarily means the presence of unregulated mines where workers, adults and children, work in cobalt mining unsafely and using only hand tools, which represents a major risk to their health and safety.
On the other hand, lithium is extracted either in Australia or from salt flats in the Andean countries of Argentina, Bolivia and Chile, a process that uses large amounts of groundwater; To pump brine solutions needed to extract lithium, which leads to a reduction in the water share of farmers – as well as indigenous herders –
The water required to produce batteries means that manufacturing electric cars consumes about 50% more water, compared to making traditional cars. On the other hand, we find that the rare earth elements required by electric car batteries often contain radioactive materials that can contaminate water and air.
Improve recycling
As previous generations of electric vehicles begin to reach the end of their life cycle, preventing the buildup of spent batteries looms as a challenge.
Most electric cars today use lithium batteries; Because of their greater ability to store energy, compared to older, more common lead-acid batteries, but while 99% of lead-acid batteries are recycled in a country like the United States, estimated recycling rates for lithium batteries are only about 5%.
Experts point out that spent batteries contain precious metals and other materials that can be recovered and reused, but the recycling process represents a challenge, in addition to the fact that they also require large amounts of water, and may emit air pollutants. So we hope that recycling of electric car batteries will improve and increase.
To clarify the matter, each battery has an efficiency rate that reflects its ability to store its full capacity. At the beginning of the battery life, this percentage approaches 100%, and with time it decreases, but when it is less than 80%, it may be unsuitable for use and need to be changed. Because this reflects the range the car travels before it needs to recharge again.
The decrease in the storage capacity of the battery does not mean that it is no longer useful, but rather it means that it may no longer be suitable for daily uses in our lives, but these batteries can be reused in other applications such as storing electricity – for example – in solar energy plants.
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found in a study conducted last year that if electric car batteries are properly reused, these used batteries can continue to be used for a decade or more as a means of energy storage.
