It`s turning into an expensive ,environmental disaster .Toxic lithium battery recycling.
The huge environmental problems of e-cars are emerging
Now it’s beginning to dawn on the greens: They’ve got a colossal environmental problem in the works – a problem they were warned about long ago and one they’ve refused to believe was real because it clashed with their vision of a green utopia.
Greens playing them down, hoping for solutions
At the moment they are playing it down, insisting solutions to avert the lithium ion battery’s environmental problem will be found in time. But they are clearly getting uneasy about it as the astronomical dimensions of the problem of producing 200 million lithium ion car batteries – and the later disposing of them – are becoming undeniable.
Expert: “Urgent environmental issue”
Not long ago Nobel Prize winning Japanese chemist and lithium battery researcher
Akira Yoshino warned that solutions for
recycling these batteries were sorely needed and that it was becoming “an urgent environmental issue.”
Huge mess for the next generations
E-vehicle batteries, once having served their intended use in e-vehicles – after about 8 years – can be reused for other lower demand purposes – a so-called second life – such as a home battery. But recycling them is inevitable – and it’s complicated, energy-intensive and expensive. Nobody knows how many are currently actually recycled, or simply just getting thrown into the landfill.
We’re creating a huge, costly mess for the next generations.
Ending up in the trash “prematurely”
Worse, Claudia Scholz at the
Handelsblatt here reports that e-vehicle batteries are already increasingly ending up in the trash – and doing so “prematurely”. “The e-car problem: t
housands of tons of batteries end up in the trash prematurely.”
Already thousands of tons of batteries
The Handelsblatt reports how Matthias Schmidt, managing director of the recycling company Erlos, “is astonished”.
“Actually, his industry had expected to be inundated with batteries from recently produced electric cars only in eight or ten years,” writes the Handelsblatt. “In fact, however, thousands of tons of batteries are already ending up at waste disposal companies.”
“We would never have imagined the quantities that would accumulate after such a short time,” says Schmidt. His company alone and competitor Duesenfeld, both of which specialize in recycling car batteries, are recycling more than 4,000 tons of batteries from almost all e-models this year – including those that have only recently come onto the market.”
