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Comment by alanwreath | Hacker News Reader

The reduction in CO2 emission resulting from EV's is definitely a win for the environment. What I didn't see from the article or its linked report was anything surrounding the effects of increased battery waste resulting from popularizing EV's.

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I keep wondering where the idea that people would just start dumping EV batteries into the trash comes from. This is not the case right now. (Totaled EVs from car crashes, with still working batteries, often go for tens of thousands of dollars.) EV batteries are full of extremely valuable materials. They can either be taken apart and used directly or at the very least, act as very high grade metal ores for further refinement into batteries. If people are paying money to dig significantly lower concentration metal ores out of the ground for turning into batteries, why would you scrap an existing battery instead of extracting the resources back out of them?

There's already multiple companies making cash flow positive money, without government subsidies, on recycling the very few EV batteries that are on the market (keep in mind that most EV batteries that have been manufactured are currently still in EVs). This is a great mini-documentary from CNBC on EV battery recycling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLr0GStrnwQ

It's just not economical to just dump EV batteries so I find this common fear to be rather unfounded and I personally suspect it's rooted in campaigning by oil companies to prevent EV adoption.

A lot of those batteries are going to find a second use in home powerbanks. They remain useful in that scenario (where remaining power-to-weight ratio matters less) much longer than in vehicles. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNbsiZcwGSY

(I also suspect a significant portion of the "what about EV externalities?!" concern got seeded by the oil industry.)

The oil industry is throwing stones in glass houses when they try to bring up externalities about renewables. Nobody has ever invaded another country over their solar, wind, or even hydroelectric resources.

Source of EV's electricity matters too. In Mexico lots of electricity comes from burning heavy crude oil so If we switched magically in a day to EVs we would just be offshoring the emissions.

Governments need to realize that just pushing EV is not going to make it alone.

If we ran the entire grid on coal, it would still be something like 15-20% cleaner to use EVs. But since the US gets just about a fifth of its electricity from coal, with the number dropping practically every day, this is no longer something to concern ourselves with. EVs are strictly better for emissions regardless of how the power is generated.

Only around 15% of Mexico's electricity comes from burning oil. The vast majority of it (over 50%) comes from burning natural gas.

Further, even with a high CO2 content electricity grid it is still cleaner to produce that electricity in power plants, because of the significantly more efficient burning that happens in large power stations versus the over 50% of energy wasted in an internal combustion engine.

In Mexico's case though with it's high natural gas content grid, switching to EVs is vastly better for CO2 pollution and general road pollution in general.

What battery waste? Batteries are highly recyclable.

Are they?

Old lead battery are highly recyclable but AFAIK the type used in EV's (and in many electronic devices such as laptops and phones) such as Li-Ion are not (easily) recyclable right now.

Hopefully by the time discarded batteries will increase in number there will be solutions, but right now there are only some "pilot" plants/technologies, see:

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56574779

And:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29110314

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29128408

It is not particularly economical to recycle EV batteries yet because they're still worth a lot more on the secondary market for non-mobile use. When we have a surplus of them, it will be cheaper to reclaim the lithium from the old batteries than it is to mine new lithium.

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