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Comment by ccsnags | Hacker News Reader

Lithium batteries aren’t green at all. Going to EVs just changes the impact on the environment.

If we can’t solve the end of life issues with lithium batteries, we need to look at them as a technology adjacent to petroleum when it pertains to environmental impact. A true step forward would be an innovation of power storage itself, rather than the mechanisms around it. Build a better gas tank.

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It seems likely that the end of life for vehicle lithium ion batteries will look roughly similar to end of life for vehicle lead acid batteries today. Namely, lead acid batteries are recycled at a rate of 99.3% in the US, making them the most recycled consumer good. The demand obviously doesn't exist right now because so few electric cars have reached end of life, but it seems like the transitioning the world to battery power will require a one-time investment of a bunch of materials (nickel arguably being the most important) then those same materials will just cycle around the economy for centuries.

https://www.recyclingtoday.com/article/battery-council-inter...

Some family members of mine work for a company that makes lead-acid batteries- and that same company also just happens to be the largest lead-recycling company in the world as well- because mining it costs more than recycling it.

I look forward to the future here- it doesn't seem like an unsolvable problem for the engineers at ${battery recycler} to go from lead-acid to NiMH or LiFePo4 or LiPo or whatever it is.

Awesome username, by the way.

tesla's plan for old car packs that lost some range is to turn them into home battery packs.

Originally the PowerWall was meant to be all recycled batteries, though there aren't generally enough vehicle batteries to recycle yet, so far as I know Tesla has never sold a PowerWall with recycled batteries.

Nissan actually drew up a plan for a PowerWall competitor before Tesla even announced theirs, but has never produced one. Nissan has claimed to actually be waiting for the point in time where Leaf and other Nissan batteries are recyclable (and also that it has so far been pleasantly surprising how long the batteries are lasting in "first use" life).

Seems unlikely. The reason that lead acid batteries are so recyclable is that they contain big slabs of pretty much entirely lead, which makes recovering it fairly cost effective. Lithium ion batteries contain relatively small amounts of the valuable metals that went into making them, and those are mixed with a whole bunch of lovely flammable and pyrophoric chemicals.

Location matters a lot with pollution. A ton of pollution in the form of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere is generally going to have a much larger impact than, say, a ton of pollution in the form of a solid pile of toxic waste.

Does producing lithium batteries produce much pollution in the atmosphere or in lakes, rivers, and oceans, or is it more in the toxic pile category?

Lithium itself is often mined from salt brines in lakes/rivers, and that will pollute such water sources (though not with lithium, more with dirt and rust and miner garbage) when done incorrectly or too cheaply. But that too is a localized pollution problem and certainly something downstream users want fixed when it happens.

Lithium itself isn't toxic and doesn't produce toxic piles, though. (Solid piles, certainly, but non-toxic, certainly not like lead.)

I've searched extensively for the environmental damage from lithium batteries, and find very little except vagueness. Can you point out why you think they are not green?

I can find much more about humanitarian concerns for the non-lithium metals in the batteries.

Recovery of cobalt from spent lithium-ion batteries using supercritical carbon dioxide extraction - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0956053X1...

The Role of Sub- and Supercritical CO2 as “Processing Solvent” for the Recycling and Sample Preparation of Lithium Ion Battery Electrolytes - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/314243271_The_Role_...

Graphite Recycling from Spent Lithium‐Ion Batteries - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/cssc.2016010...

I am starting to think that the lithium-scare is funded by oil companies. They manage to make these "common wisdom" without ever sourcing it.

"EVs changes the impact on the environment". Yes, by lowering it by an order of magnitude. It does not emit CO2 (and far less overall even including CO2 emission during production, which personally I think is fraudulent reasoning) it emits far less particles, no gases.

Its recycling indusrty is new because, guess what, there are far less discarded EV than regular ones nowadays, but batteries are notorious for being recyclable in a lot of ways. And with the increasing demands for renewable energy, the demand for intermittence smoothing will rise a lot. I can see old batteries that can only run at 40% capacity being reused to make powerwalls.

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