By P Gosselin on 17. April 2021
It’s all beginning to dawn on the greens: the looming environmental disaster of e-vehicle batteries.
When it comes to lithium-ion e-vehicles and the environmentalist greens and profiteers:
- They know it’s a disaster.
- We know it’s a disaster.
- They know that we know that they know it’s a disaster.
- But they still pretend it isn’t.*
The huge environmental problems of e-cars are emerging
Now it’s beginning to dawn on the greens: They’ve got a colossal environmental problem in the works – a problem they were warned about long ago and one they’ve refused to believe was real because it clashed with their vision of a green utopia.
Greens playing them down, hoping for solutions
At the moment they are playing it down, insisting solutions to avert the lithium ion battery’s environmental problem will be found in time. But they are clearly getting uneasy about it as the astronomical dimensions of the problem of producing 200 million lithium ion car batteries – and the later disposing of them – are becoming undeniable.
Expert: “Urgent environmental issue”
Not long ago Nobel Prize winning Japanese chemist and lithium battery researcher Akira Yoshino warned that solutions for recycling these batteries were sorely needed and that it was becoming “an urgent environmental issue.”
Huge mess for the next generations
E-vehicle batteries, once having served their intended use in e-vehicles – after about 8 years – can be reused for other lower demand purposes – a so-called second life – such as a home battery. But recycling them is inevitable – and ot’s complicated, energy-intensive and expensive. Nobody knows how many are currently actually recycled, or simply just getting thrown into the landfill.
We’re creating a huge, costly a mess for the next generations.
Ending up in the trash “prematurely”
Worse, Claudia Scholz at the Handelsblatt here reports that e-vehicle batteries are already increasingly ending up in the trash – and doing so “prematurely”. “The e-car problem: thousands of tons of batteries end up in the trash prematurely.”
Already thousands of tons of batteries
The Handelsblatt reports how Matthias Schmidt, managing director of the recycling company Erlos, “is astonished”.
“Actually, his industry had expected to be inundated with batteries from recently produced electric cars only in eight or ten years,” writes the Handelsblatt. “In fact, however, thousands of tons of batteries are already ending up at waste disposal companies.”
“We would never have imagined the quantities that would accumulate after such a short time,” says Schmidt. His company alone and competitor Duesenfeld, both of which specialize in recycling car batteries, are recycling more than 4,000 tons of batteries from almost all e-models this year – including those that have only recently come onto the market.”
The dangerous half-knowledge of green central planners
But that’s the way it is with these self-anointed masterminds, who at their universities were immunized against comprehending the dangers of their half-knowledge. What follows are how disastrous leftist ideas run their course:
- They’re convinced it’s a brilliant idea
- Ignore signs and warnings there is a disaster
- Play down the disaster as it emerges
- Acknowledge the disaster, but insist solutions are coming
- Move the goalposts when solution don’t arrive
- Deny the disaster no matter what. But if you can’t:
- Then admit there is a disaster
- And then insist it was never your idea to begin with
- Hope it will be forgotten
- Blame it all on others if it isn’t
==================================
*A variation of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s original quote: “We know that they are lying, they know that they are lying, they even know that we know they are lying, we also know that they know we know they are lying too, they of course know that we certainly know they know we know they are lying too as well, but they are still lying.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
I took an aged recliner chair to the dump (transfer station) yesterday. I grew up when there were trash heaps on the edge of towns, with bear scavenging at night and rats most of the time. We spot-lighted the bears at times and others used the rats as targets.
Now we have transfer stations where scavenging is not allowed. Too bad, although good lumber is often found, I’ve only gotten half sheets of plywood once.
Anyway, the chair had a steel base and all the wiring still attached. All this stuff is being buried. A future resource in the making.
However, I saw no EVs or the batteries, nor where there any wind blades.
An energetic person could do a post on all the good stuff that goes into landfills, and where the batteries and blades are going.
A few years ago the pig-tail lights came with a warning to open windows and vacate the building if one was broken. Also, an extra fee (tax) was paid so these dangerous things could be recycled. I wonder who thought it a good idea to drive 30+ miles to turn in a light bulb that failed. I still have some of those bulbs. I suspect many folks do, but the turn-in program seems to have faded.
Fear of the compact fluorescents was probably a bit exaggerated! Don’t eat them; but then the state of Commifornia has determined that every substance known to Mankind is harmful and carcinogenic!
Federal law should require that all large, bloated bureaucracies be labeled as toxic and hazardous to the health of the voters; except the ones that are already dead or have voted multiple times!
While the fear of (breaking) them was probably a bit exaggerated, the fact remains they do contain toxic elements that should be disposed of properly. However, I suspect most people don’t know where to dispose of them properly nor why they should do so and just toss them into the regular trash.
From what I’ve read, the energy required to recycle Li ion batteries exceeds the energy required to produce them from raw materials. If you double the energy cost of the batteries, then they no longer make sense economically.
People who virtue signal by driving electric cars are ignoring the byproducts of the battery life cycle.
Internal combustion autos are economically recycled, and have as a consequence of their use, the production of clean CO2.
Li ion electric vehicles will produce more CO2 in their life cycles than IC cars, and also create mountains of toxic chemicals from their recycling.
Could use more detail on the “disaster” aspect. High costs to recycle? Toxic emissions during process? Or ?
Reading this brought this 1970s UK hit to mind.
https://youtu.be/6Zf1loc6S7U
“We had to destroy village in order to save it”
well, this seems to be just another reason why lithium as car battery is only a transition technique.. I believe better options are on the horizon, for example sodium based batteries
As the production pipeline switches over to EVs, their batteries will sooner or later show up as part of a waste stream. Because of their toxic nature, they must be processed so as to first harvest anything of value and second that what is left is not an undue hazard to the environment. The wizards of smart own this. Conventional autos are just melted down and the metal recycled after other recyclable components like the battery and catalytic converters are removed.
Add to that the environmental disaster of Neodymium mining in China for wind turbine magnets.
The world needs a gas-guzzler code, which would impose a fee on low-mileage vehicles.
The more below 40-mpg, the higher would be the fee.
Any vehicles with greater than 40-mpg, such as the 54-mpg Toyota Prius, would be exempt.
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/high-costs-of-wind-solar-and-battery-systems
“Break their will” RE folks would have everyone drive unaffordable EVs, that would not reduce much CO2 compared with efficient gasoline vehicles.
On a lifetime, A-to-Z basis, with travel at 105,600 miles over 10 years, the CO2 emissions, based on the present New England grid CO2/kWh, would be:
NISSAN Leaf S Plus, EV, compact SUV, no AWD, would emit 25.967 Mt, 246 g/mile
TOYOTA Prius L Eco, 62 mpg, compact car, no AWD, would emit 26,490 Mt, 251 g/mile
SUBARU Outback, 30 mpg, medium SUV, with AWD, would emit 43.015 Mt, 407 g/mile
VT Light Duty Vehicle mix, 22.7 mpg, many with AWD or 4WD, would emit 56,315 Mt, 533 g/mile
It would take at least 20 years to build out 13,500 MW wind turbines off the coast of New England, plus large-scale solar systems to reduce the NE grid CO2/kWh by about 30%
With that much wind and solar, the NE grid would become very unstable, i.e., inoperable. The NE grid would need:
1) Curtailments of wind output, kWh, on windy days
2) Curtailments of midday solar output bulges on sunny days
2) Major connections to the Canadian grid
3) Grid-scale batteries, with a capacity of 3 to 4 TWh; turnkey capital cost about $1.5 to $2 TRILLION, at $500/kWh, delivered as AC
No, the world needs no gas-guzzler code, because “emissions” of CO2 are no environmental threat whatsoever. Nor does the world need EVs, which are a non-solution in search of a problem.
What the world needs is an end to the funding of junk science.
— I’m looking forward to see how these steps apply to Covid-19 mARN and ADN-vector vaccines. We now seem to have reached the third step.
— Following Alex Berenson on Twitter is useful to anticipate what might be coming next.
Ah, this is like the diesel disaster. Encouraged by the Greens and “scientists”, governments decided to promote diesel engines, ignoring the pollution they produced (less CO2, lots of other much nastier stuff). As the emissions standards tightened, the manufacturers used cheats to beat the tests. Dieselgate. Needless to say, the politicians, greens and scientists all denied it was a problem until it became too much and then ran away, crying ” a big boy did it”.
4000 tons is in no way surprising.
A single Tesla holds 1000 to 1200 lbs. 4000 tons is 40K Teslas – far more than they sell in Germany but there are also all the Powerbanks, laptop batteries, cell phone batteries, e-scooter batteries, drone batteries etc.
Every solution brings its own set of problems.
How hard can it be, it cannot be insolvable, its not nuclear fusion? It is mainly the sequence that is worrying, Solve first then introduce.
The main problem eco loons, scientists, and engineers are having is that “fossil fuels”(a bad misnomer!) are TOO effective. They are MUCH more energy dense making any other portable application nearly useless.
People forget that gasoline has, as a major ingredient, octane- an 8 carbon molecule that includes typically 10 hydrogens too-along for the ride and the excitement. Octane is a good example of the MUCH higher energy density of carbon-based fuel than pure hydrogen.
32 electrons are available on the carbon atoms. 10 on the hydrogens. Some of the energy is already tied up in the molecule, but in the end we get, ideally, 8 molecules of CO2 and 10 of H2O. It is extremely expensive to try and pack an equivalent amount of energy in a tank the small suitcase when using hydrogen.
Hydorgen’s best use is in petroleum refining and reforming, and producing building blocks for plastics production. Various refining processes are the “cheapest”, and in most cases the best way to produce the huge number of precursors needed in plastics, fabric, medicines, fuels, lubricants, fertilizer and more.
My 1999 Toyota runs well. Keeping it going and not buying a new car is the greenest thing I can do.
I hate to throw fecal matter into the punch bowl but it appears that these things can be recycled, reclaiming a large percentage of the raw materials, at least that is what the recycling companies claim.
https://csm.umicore.com/en/battery-recycling/our-recycling-process#tabs
https://www.solvay.com/en/press-release/veolia-partnership-renew-life-cycle-electric-car-batteries
https://www.toyota-europe.com/world-of-toyota/feel/environment/better-earth/recycle
https://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/recycling_batteries
In the US, infrastructure is starting to catch up to the electric car world with charging stations popping up. I never thought I would see a bank of Tesla chargers at a filling station in Childress, Texas in 2021. People were actually driving cross country in their electric vehicles. Not a lot of stations but a start. You can read comments when you click a particular station in the link. It sounds like going cross country in this way is still an adventure but I’m amazed it is even possible. For now, I’m still sticking with my 2006 Tahoe.
https://www.plugshare.com/