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Comment by olivermarks | Hacker News Reader

Chile is already being ruined. Pay close attention to the lithium triangle as it expands and the state the planet is left in after being mined

https://www.euronews.com/green/2022/02/01/south-america-s-li...

Why is lithium extraction bad for the environment? Any type of resource extraction is harmful to the planet. This is because removing these raw materials can result in soil degradation, water shortages, biodiversity loss, damage to ecosystem functions and an increase in global warming.

But when we think of extraction, we think of fossil fuels like coal and gas. Unfortunately, lithium also falls under the same umbrella, despite paving the way for an electric future.. Lithium can be described as the non-renewable mineral that makes renewable energy possible - often touted as the next oil.

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But it isn't lost or scattered into the atmosphere. It's kept well contained in a nice container which can be moved around easily with a forklift. The metals can be reprocessed and turned back into more batteries.

Even first generation Leaf batteries are still being sold for reasonable sums of money so we haven't even reached the stage were we are recycling them in ernest yet.

The recycling processes and costs are astronomical and environmentally damaging. https://www.solarreviews.com/blog/are-lithium-ion-batteries-...

As lithium batteries degrade they become more unstable and fire prone. I'm sure you're familiar with what happens to your laptop battery as it ages - shorter and shorter life, swelling etc.

You're thinking of a particular kind of battery with a flammable electrolyte. Other popular chemistries (LFP being the most obvious) aren't anywhere near as fire-prone.

And of course, laptop batteries get worked -much- harder and treated to much harsher environments than any EV battery.

Teslas use LFP batteries

https://youtu.be/J6eS6JzBn0k?t=77

That video is from January 2021. Tesla didn't start using LFP batteries in their non-Chinese vehicles before October 2021:

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/20/tesla-switching-to-lfp-batte...

https://tesla-cdn.thron.com/static/TWPKBV_TSLA_Q3_2021_Quart... (page 7)

> Why is lithium extraction bad for the environment? Any type of resource extraction is harmful to the planet. This is because removing these raw materials can result in soil degradation, water shortages, biodiversity loss, damage to ecosystem functions and an increase in global warming.

Are you trying to argue that using fossil fuels is better for the environment? It’s not clear if you’re using this opportunity to complain about mining in general or if you’re arguing that we are better off with petrol cars.

They’re directly quoting text from the article. See the section “ Why is lithium extraction bad for the environment?”.

If we develop a proper biofuel then we are going to wish we still had carbon powered cars imo. The issue with carbon fuel is that it gets put into the atmosphere and not recaptured, thus warming the planet and disturbing ecology. Once a method is used to capture this carbon organically, however, then carbon just becomes a transient used delivery device and a store for solar energy that powers the underlying photosynthesis to restructure atmospheric carbon into solids. A tree trunk or a pound of green algae becomes a fungible unit of energy. Everything changes.

> Chile is already being ruined.

By copper mining. Lithium is unnoticeable in comparison.

Lithium is non-renewable (we have a finite supply of it), but it's also not a consumable so this is rather less of an issue. Lithium in batteries is more comparable to steel in car bodies than fossil fuels.

Cars used to be made of steel and were very recyclable. More recently they are mostly made of plastics and alloys that are not easily recyclable.

Lithium is extremely hard to recycle.

> Cars used to be made of steel and were very recyclable. More recently they are mostly made of plastics and alloys that are not easily recyclable.

50/50, actually.

There is still some steel in the core load bearing areas of modern vehicle but they are predominantly alloys. I'd say around 60% alloys, 35% plastics and 5% steel would be an average

Let's all just make up numbers when we could find them with 15 seconds' effort.

https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter4/transportat...

Ferrous metals 65%.

1 Ferrous metal blends with other materials are increasingly the main components of vehicles. MMC etc. Where body shops used to straighten collision damage on jigs to pull out damaged steel chassis, bodyshells etc the modern composites are very hard to repair, containing all sorts of materials including steel, alloys, plastics etc. They are also hard to recycle.

2 How old is that graphic?

3 Manners

"Ferrous metals" means steels of various kinds, or pure iron, which isn't used much these days. 65% is more than 5%.

"Manners" in this forum means providing credible sources to back up your claims. If you have credible sources that contradict Transport Geography, supply them.

1. https://www.metalsupermarkets.com/what-is-a-ferrous-metal/

The image was from a 'book' published in 2022, so probably around 4-6 years old being generous as it is the 5th edition.

https://matmatch.com/resources/blog/advanced-high-strength-s...

AHSS is essentially steel at its core but is very hard to move once damaged, unlike 16 or 18 gauge pure stamped steel in an early 70's era car for example, that was superseded by the high strength low alloys (HSLA) in the late 1970's. If you hammer and dolly the older pure steels there will be a 'memory' of the original stamping it will reconform too. The newer HSLA alloys were much less malleable

It is amazing how fast this world has evolved in the last five years.

High strength 'steel' has a low alloying and carbon content to retain formability and weldability, with copper, titanium, vanadium, and niobium added for strengthening purposes. These are complex alloys that replaced the earlier HSLA and are both very hard to work and also to recycle.

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