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Comment by mbgerring | Hacker News Reader

> "lithium mining destroying the environment"

1. Any environmental impact from lithium mining needs to be weighed against the impact of continued extraction and burning of fossil fuels

2. Lithium is recyclable (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1682-5) and there is room for a lot of process improvement in lithium extraction (https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/07/general-motors-looks-to...)

3. Studies of the lifecycle emissions (emissions including manufacturing) of electric cars consistently find that EVs beat ICE vehicles, and future lifecycle emissions must be considered as a curve, as the percentage of renewables on the electric grid increases and industrial process eventually move away from fossil fuels (https://www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-how-electric-vehicles-...)

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In fact, an ICCT study shows that hydrogen tank manufacture is as CO2 intensive as batteries… if that is true, my mind is blown

https://theicct.org/publications/global-LCA-passenger-cars-j...

https://twitter.com/colinmckerrache/status/14193077299995115...

> Any environmental impact from lithium mining needs to be weighed against the impact of continued extraction and burning of fossil fuels

There's also the costs and externalities of shipping fuel to fueling stations all over the country in perpetuity, there's no additional cost to "ship" electricity to homes or charging stations.

Some (5%) electricity is lost during the transfer.

https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=105&t=3

>1. Any environmental impact from lithium mining needs to be weighed against the impact of continued extraction and burning of fossil fuels

Why? If we're comparing EVs and hydrogen powered cars then we shouldn't. We should compare lithium usage to what hydrogen powered cars need.

>2. Lithium is recyclable

But do we actually recycle lithium in enough quantities?

>Currently, globally, it's very hard to get detailed figures for what percentage of lithium-ion batteries are recycled, but the value everyone quotes is about 5%," says Dr Anderson. "In some parts of the world it's considerably less."

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

Lithium-ion batteries can be the most recyclable thing in the world, but if we don't actually recycle them then it makes no difference.

There are quite a few stories about companies and research groups gunning for increasingly high lithium extraction from spent batteries. We're not there yet, but leave it to an open market to extract something of value as efficiently as possible from an effectively free resource.

> We're not there yet, but leave it to an open market to extract something of value as efficiently as possible from an effectively free resource.

Recycling can never be free or even close. There's a lot of processing that goes from dismantling a battery, to segregating the lithium, to putting it back in a new battery. Recycle is last of the 3 Rs for a reason.

We're not even recycling "recyclables" at very impressive rates. Our local waste management program here in Maryland has a Facebook page that talks about how there are a very very limited number and types of plastics that are even accepted at recycling facilities - and the market for recyclables is starting to dry up. Largely because a lot of the foreign countries that were taking it in by the container ship load have stopped doing so.

The market for industrial metal and chemical recycling is completely different than consumer plastics. Metals are often recycled because there is significant money in it. Recycling plastic is not profitable and frequently not even possible.

If you want to consider lithium against hydrogen, that's fine: What's the environmental impact of hydrogen electrolysis, transportation, and construction of infrastructure to support it at a scale large enough to replace the ICE vehicle fleet? What kinds of materials need to be extracted to produce hydrogen fuel cells, and at what scale? How do those compare to the inputs for lithium ion batteries?

The sobering answer is that fuel cells also need a lot of problematic minerals too for catalysts. The most widely used H2 fuel cell catalyst is PtCo - so you still have the same cobalt problem there too.

Except hydrogen fuel cell vehicles lost already. There's no point comparing to them because we don't live in a reality where they're going to become a thing. If you want to play the "what if" game, that has its merits, but it has nothing to do with the world we presently live in or the proximate future.

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