EV batteries are certainly not a poster child for sustainability. From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:
One of the interesting things about this hard-push to power everything – especially cars – electrically is that a critical material (lithium) isn’t renewable and for that reason there’s less incentive to recycle the box that contained it.
That is to say, the EV’s enormous battery pack.
People are used to recycling lead-acid batteries – the ones that are a fraction of the size of an EV’s battery pack and used to start the engine that propels a non-electric car. These can be recycled – or rather, there is incentive to recycle them because the lead isn’t used up and can be recycled. But the lithium in an electric car’s lithium-ion battery pack is gone once consumed. This means it will take getting more of it from the environment to make another EV lithium-ion battery pack.
Think about that.
We are told – we are lectured, endlessly – about the necessity of “sustainability.” But what is “sustainable” about using up scarce, hard-to-get materials that cannot be replaced except by extracting, refining and manufacturing more of the same stuff?
Of which there is by dint of that less stuff.
As well as more damage done to the “environment”?
