Are they the small disaster ? What do you think is going to happen with all the lithium after being bounded by a 10 year old with a rock?
Probably just going to land in the river, and then the sea.
Probably just going to land in the river, and then the sea.
Go ahead and try drinking a glass of lithium, or try growing vegetables with lithium instead of water.
The claim that electric cars are good for the environment is a lie. They are not "good", they are not even "neutral". They are "bad".
People that really care about the environment ride a bike. They don't buy an electric car and try to justify the currently unknown long term environmental consequences of their purchase as somehow being better than the known consequences of gasoline and diesel cars.
Today we just ship car batteries oversees to be scrapped for parts in the cheapest possible way by children. That doesn't sound good to me at all.
> People that really care about the environment ride a bike. They don't buy an electric car and try to justify the currently unknown long term environmental consequences of their purchase as somehow being better than the known consequences of gasoline and diesel cars.
This is so much false dichotomy that I'm having trouble assuming good faith.
In many parts of the world, you would take a train or other forms of public transport to travel distances too far to ride by bike. Those often have last-mile problems when the train doesn't go quite where you need it to, but given sufficient density at the source/destination bikes are an effective solution to the last-mile problem.
Of course, in the US, we typically have sprawl at the source/destination, unsafe infrastructure for bicycling, and often not-very-useful public transport, which does rather limit this option.
So....exactly like normal cars then? Buying a brand new car is bad for the environment, full stop, ICE or EV.
The statement above makes sense if taken in isolation - take an existing ICE car and an existing EV car - the EV car is undoubtedly better for the environment, there is no discussion. But it would also be a lot better if neither existed, as manufacturing new cars is EXTREMELY wasteful and produces incredible amounts of CO2 debt, again, EV or not.
>>oday we just ship car batteries oversees to be scrapped for parts in the cheapest possible way by children.
As opposed to stripping out electronics and precious metals from ICE cars, which is only ever done by well regulated workers in rich western countries, right? /s
Like, come on - I get your point. Shitty "recycling" practices exist. That doesn't mean that's the standard or the default, and it definitely can be fixed going forward. We aren't destined or doomed to only recycle our lithium batteries with 10 year old children with rocks, and for some reason you're framing it as if that's the only available method.
I don't, because I don't feel like putting my life at risk on a regular basis just to get where I need to go.
There's a reason that bike ridership skyrockets when useful protected bike infrastructure gets installed. The demand is there.
Not all, but many.
#1: The whole point of preserving the environment is to keep it inhabitable for humans. Fueling humans is non-negotiable up to at least a baseline level of survival, and still desirable beyond that level because we like being well fed.
and
#2: Due to that whole "we like being well fed" thing, most humans in the first world -- the part of the world where people worry about things like whether biking to work is good or bad for the environment -- are already overfueled. We have a surplus of human fuel that we're consuming anyway because it feels good. Might as well burn some of it off on transportation.
We are enormously expanding our use of lithium, and the biggest problem for the places that are currently trying to recycle lithium batteries is that there aren't enough of them to recycle. A big source of their current batteries are just the defects from the current manufacturing process.
Hopefully by 2030 there will be a robust network of recycling facilities around the world, for the majority of exhausted lithium batteries.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/batteries-storage/lithiumio...