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I wasn't sure where to put this post Chat or Bike, but decided as the MTB world is fast becoming the e-MTB world I would put it here.
I have been thinking for some time about the environmental cost of our move away from fossil fuels to "cleaner" (maybe?) electric alternatives. Nothing is for free and there is a cost to everything we use and buy. We can make electricity in a cleaner way, solar, wind, tidal, nuclear (?), but we still need the means to produce and distribute that power, there is a large environmental cost to building and maintaining that infrastructure. However the point of this post is the cost of the rampant battery industry that we are creating and the environmental cost of that industry. The lithium in our batteries (in phones, bikes, cars and a multitude of other everyday devices) is produced at a huge cost to the environment, just google "the environmental cost of batteries" and there are lots of disastrous stories about the impact of lithium mining. Depending on the article you read a Tesla car has about 63lbs of lithium in its batteries. In 10-15 years time the car industry should only be producing electric cars so where are all the batteries be coming from? Are we just swapping CO2 production from fossil fuels for different but equally effective ways to pollute the planet?
Cycling has a relatively low impact on the environment compared to say a car, but with the advent of e-bikes its impact is growing considerably. Added to this is the issue of re-cycling, it can be done, but given that the average battery life is 3-7 years, the infrastructure needed to do it has to be in place very soon, actually now. At present Redwood materials in the US recycle 20,000 tons of lithium batteries a year and is looking to do a deal with Specialized to recycle their batteries. However the cost of getting lithium from recycled batteries is 5 times what it costs to mine it, so does it make economic sense to the bean counters? One estimate says that worldwide there will be 11 million tons of spent lithium-ion batteries per year by 2025, without systems in place to handle them.
Researching some of this information was quite eye opening for me and is making me think that that this bright clean electric future is just another can of worms we have opened.
However the cost of getting lithium from recycled batteries is 5 times what it costs to mine it, so does it make economic sense to the bean counters?
1. Requiring manufacturers to recycle batteries will go a long way to addressing these concerns.
2. I haven't checked your sources, but the cost of recycling should fall drastically, especially if recycling is mandatory because battery manufacturers will be forced to design them with recycling in mind.
3. As battery EVs become dominant, the price of lithium will rise so that recycling will be much more attractive than it is now.
I tend to agree with you - from a sustainability and recyclability standpoint, something like a 1960's Fiat 500 is much better than any EV. It also comes with the benefit of strongly discouraging long journeys!
As the mandated takeup of EVs continues, we will also discover the supply and demand of the various minerals needed (copper, lithium, and cobalt prices have already gone up quite a lot this year).
I'm sure someone will be along soon to say "but in the future we will develop better battery recycling technology". However, "future tech" is a good answer to anything, including the issues caused by driving an ICE car.
Also, you are underestimating the battery life. According to this article
EV battery recycling: cost and components
Audi guarantee their batteries for 8 years, with 70% capacity at the end of that. After that, they have potential for several more years of use as storage. So you're actually looking at 10 to 15 years use, not 3.
Reuse in power grids
The installation uses 20 Audi e-tron battery systems that provide it with a storage capacity of 1.9 MWh. The company confirms that the batteries used in the installation have been taken from test vehicles. It adds that the batteries it uses to power production vehicles are currently designed to last the whole lifetime of the vehicle with 160,000km or eight years of use guaranteed. But even at the end of that duration they will still have a state-of-charge (SOC) capacity of 70% compared to their ‘as new’ performance, so there is still plenty of potential for further use. Indeed, the company estimates that used EV Li-ion batteries could have a further lifespan in a grid-related storage application of “five to ten years”.
@thols2 -
I should been more specific, the 3-7 years life span was quoted for e-bike batteries. My wife's e-bike battery failed after 5 years of reasonably low usage.
The Audi 8 years or 160,000km guaranteed is just a guarantee that they will cover any shortfall if it doesn't reach those milestones. It also says "it should last the lifetime of the vehicle", surely the vehicle itself should last much much longer than 8 years. My wife and myself both have vehicles (not electric) which are over 10 years old with a lot less than 100k miles on the clock, I would expect e-cars to last a lot longer, with battery changes, than todays petrol/diesel vehicles.
https://www.ft.com/content/c6909812-9ce4-11e9-9c06-a4640c9feebb
"Congo, child labour and your electric car"
Cobalt mining raises some questions and concerns
I should been more specific, the 3-7 years life span was quoted for e-bike batteries.
Keep in mind that an electric car generally has hundreds of kilograms of battery. An e-bike has a tiny fraction of that. The major recycling effort will focus on cars because that's where there'll be millions of tonnes of batteries. Having a 15 year lifespan is a massive difference to a 5 year lifespan when you're dealing with that sort of quantity of material.
Is it Daily Mail Monday again?
I dknt see electric cars as the answer, for the reasons given in the OP, primarily the costs of lithium mining.
As I see it the vast bulk of car journeys are ones which shouldn't be made by car at all, say sub-10 miles which could, and should, be done by bike. For example two of my colleagues drive a half a mile and one mile to work, even a bike would be unnecessary walking would be fine!
Cutting car usage in general would have a much bigger impact than changing some of those cars for some (slightly, or possibly not what when you consider all the manufacturing impacts) less polluting cars.
But unfortunately humans are fundamentally lazy and will quite happily spend tens of thousands of pounds on a vehicle so that they can sit in a traffic jam rather than make any physical effort to get around.
But unfortunately humans are fundamentally lazy and will quite happily spend tens of thousands of pounds on a vehicle so that they can sit in a traffic jam rather than make any physical effort to get around.
It's not just that though is it. We've built a world which is obsessed with continuous, pointless, notional 'economic growth' / profits, so there's a huge vested interest in simply making more 'stuff'. In this case, cars.
Any sort of move towards making less stuff collides head on with the vested interests of the huge corporations who rely on selling more and more things. We need to completely re-think the way our world works, stop focussing on material objects in the mistaken belief that they will bring us happiness. We need to change our lifestyles so we're not convinced we're dependent on personal motorised transport. We need to stop the lunacy where the vast bulk of the world's wealth is concentrated in the hands of a tiny number of people who spend that money on more, hyper-expensive stuff and making sure the system is self perpetuating.
It's all infuriatingly and tragically obvious. The answer to massively reducing the impact of cars on our environment is to produce and use fewer cars of any kind, petrol, diesel, cow dung, electric, any of them. Oh, brake dust and particles from tyre wear, electric cars still churn those out.
Anyway
What people have got to remember is that lithium ion batteries are basically a stop-gap at the moment. Its the modern equivalent of Betamax.
There are batteries being developed that will be easier to recycle, are more durable and have higher capacities so won't need as much materials.
If that aluminium battery is half as good as their marketing department is claiming, it'll be a massive improvement. Not just from eliminating lithium, but if you really can fully charge them in a minute or two, that will make a huge difference to charging infrastructure.
Was reading about lithium-metal batteries the other day. If they can get those to work, the life of the battery really will be the life of the vehicle.
Agree on usage though - even Mrs Dubs with her dodgy knee has swapped her 3 mile commute to a bike now and only drives if she has a load of stuff to take, or it's snowing 🙂
Battery recycling will grow . The biggest stopper to that is that the cost of raw materials such as lithium are going down rather than up if you look at a 5 year period rather than the last couple of months - long term trend as opposed to short term , covid induced trend,(they've flattened now)
Need to make sure we're comparing like for like. A modern EV is still moving a big hunk of metal around and the environmental cost in its manufacture and use is substantial. It's not a sustainable thing to do compared with walking, cycling, taking the bus or living closer to work, or perhaps even driving a really tiny and by modern standards dangerous Fiat 500 around. But compared with driving around a similarly sized lump of ICE powered car it is a significant positive step.
It is indeed to be hoped that we can make a lot more strides in the right direction, and quickly. Better batteries might/should be one of those, but they could be a long way off.
I don't agree with the statement that a move from a future where we keep making and putting on the roads diesel SUVs to one where we transfer that habit to EVs, is an environmental cost though. It's only part of the story, and perhaps transitional, but it is net positive.
the cost of raw materials such as lithium are going down rather than up
From that link above about the aluminium batteries:
Another benefit would be cost. Lithium has risen from US$1460 a metric tonne in 2005 to US$13,000 a tonne this week, while aluminum’s price has edged up from US$1730 to US$2078 over the same period.
Another advantage is that the GMG graphene aluminum-ion cells do not use copper, which costs around US$8470 a tonne.
Thought for you...
What's the lifespan of the ~60kg of fossil fuels in your car?
About 6 hours?
How do you then recover that and recycle it once you've used it?
Ohh you don't? Hypocrite.
How do you then recover that and recycle it once you’ve used it?
Same way I recycle the oil, gas, and biomass that makes up around 2/3rds of the UK's energy mix. FWIW, unless we switch to nuclear, "renewables" just cannot make up the amount of energy we use as a country, especially if we include transportation energy requirements.
The unsustainable part of car ownership is not the way it is powered, but the idea that we can all own a large, motorised metal box that can move us and our possessions for huge distances (as well as the casual way that we consume incredible amounts of energy, including in all of the items (especially electronics) that we all take for granted). Switching to EVs is not, in my opinion, a path to a more sustainable future, but just continuing the current unsustainable culture all while enriching a select group of companies and countries, as well as creating a huge amount of new and complex electrical waste.
But then there's no money in telling people to stop buying stuff.