https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ywajkw/todays-electric-car-batteries-will-be-tomorrows-e-waste-crisis-scientists-warnToday's Electric Car Batteries Will Be Tomorrow's E-Waste Crisis, Scientists WarnElectric vehicles will play a crucial role in humanity’s fossil fuel-free future, but no technology comes without cost. The lithium-ion batteries that EVs run on are made from metals that are mined at a serious environmental and human toll, and from supplies that won’t last forever. When those batteries die, they’re liable to join the tens of millions of tons of spent electronics piling up as e-waste in landfills around the world.
That’s why we badly need to develop better methods for recycling EV batteries and start scaling up the recycling infrastructure now, a team led by researchers at the University of Birmingham in the UK argue in a review paper published today in Nature.
As the paper notes, the one million EVs sold around the world in 2017 will eventually result in 250,000 tons of battery pack waste that the world’s recycling infrastructure is ill-equipped to handle. And while EV batteries can last for up to 20 years, the potential battery waste in the pipeline as EV sales grow year over year is enormous.
A key message in this is that the amount of EV batteries that need and soon will need to be recycled is well ahead not only of the facilities, but also the processes to recycle them. More simply, we will soon have a couple hundred thousand tons of dead batteries and don't know what to do with them.