Sufficient systems to deal with electric waste are yet to be developed. Photo /123RF
The shift to electric vehicles is inevitable, but electric waste poses a significant question over their green credentials.
Germany's courts were witness to a strange row between unlikely enemies last week when Tesla was pitched against a group of environmentalists.
Work on the electric car firm's new German factory was briefly halted after eco-warriors objected to the company cutting down trees.
The protesters were ultimately overruled, and work resumed on the plant – but the case was a reminder that the journey to an electrified future is not without its own environmental complications.
The shift to electric mobility now seems almost inevitable, and a necessary step to make city air cleaner and reduce emissions. But there are pitfalls, and one of them is what we do with the millions of lithium-ion batteries which will power the electric vehicles set to take over our roads.
Professor Jay Whitacre, a trustee professor in energy, engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University, believes this is a "critical situation".
"I believe now that the infrastructure for dealing with these spent batteries that will be done, at least with their first lifetime, sometime in the next five to 10 years, is not in place at all," he says.
E-waste in general is already a huge problem. Last year a UN report concluded that of the 50m tonnes of electric and electronic waste produced worldwide each year, just 20 per cent was formally recycled.
The e-scooters which have become common sights on the streets of American and European cities are touted by their operators as an answer to air pollution and the climate crisis. Powered by lithium-ion batteries, the idea is that they replace car trips and bring down emissions.
While the companies say newer models last much longer, initially the small, light vehicles were lasting as little as a few weeks before succumbing to the elements, being thrown in a body of water or vandalised by a resentful local.
Matthew Chester, an energy analyst, says he has encountered "radio silence" when asking about their sustainability plans.
"It's frustrating because it's not that the materials can't last or the battery can't be reused. The problem is that the business case is how much would it cost to have somebody go out and repair them, it's something that could presumably be repaired and recycled but they're operating on thin margins and trying to beat out the competition," he says.
"There's issues with [batteries], there's issues with anything in a landfill, increasing the amount of stuff we have in a limited amount of landfill."
John Heinkel and Dan Borelli operate a scooter pick-up business in San Diego. They remove and store shared scooters when property owners object to their presence, leading to legal battles with many of the big scooter firms in the US.
"We're storing their product, and when the litigation gets settled that will have to be worked out one way or the other," says Borelli. "Unfortunately, a lot of these big 'green' (in title only) billion dollar businesses have abandoned a lot of their product and, imagine, we have 15,000 scooters in our impound yard."
So the pair have pivoted from scooter collection to scooter re-use. Their new startup, SharedTopia, involves attaching battery packs initially to bicycles and later to electric vans, to provide charging services to scooter companies.
The packs are each made up of between 30 and 50 batteries recovered from the scooters the company has retrieved over the years. Borelli says they are in the middle of a bid for a contract with a major scooter company, to provide the service in three US cities.
The companies say they are getting better at making sure no scooters end up in places they shouldn't, and that the newer models are lasting up to 18 months.
Melinda Hanson, Bird's head of sustainability, said it's economically beneficial for them to recycle. "That's something that we really prioritise, and given how valuable the materials that are in these vehicles are, it hasn't been a big challenge for us."
She says the company has always had a "robust recycling programme", and over time, has "done a pretty amazing job at reducing our rate of lost vehicles".
Hans Eric Melin, director of London-based consultancy Circular Energy Storage, says current batteries are too valuable to be simply abandoned in large quantities.
In particular, one oft-quoted decade-old figure stating that just 5pc of lithium-ion batteries are recycled in Europe is "really wrong", he says. The true figure is closer to 45pc.
Like Bird, recyclers have an economic incentive not to dump batteries because of the valuable minerals found within, in particular cobalt.
He says the misconception comes from the fact that many existing batteries are not recycled in Europe or the US but are instead shipped to Asia, so the official collection programmes record very low figures.
"South Korea and China have much more sophisticated processes than we have in the US and Europe, they are able to pay much more for the material. So in America, most of the collectors will sell to Asia, and that is happening in Europe as well.
"And that is the chicken and egg story, because it gets harder for the recyclers in Europe and in North America to really build up that capacity and efficiency that is required for them to have the process."
China, he says, "has a recycling capacity that is sufficient to take care of what they will have in 2026 or 27."
Of course, with a predicted 125m electric vehicles on the road by 2030, it is far from sustainable for all expired batteries from the US and Europe to be shipped to Asia for recycling. Engineers are also exploring "second-life" uses, where car batteries are used for energy storage, though it's still unclear how effective or safe this is likely to be.
The dominance of Asia – particularly China – is a sustainability issue as well as a problem for the growing electric car industry in Europe and the US, which is reliant on materials processed and shipped in from abroad. It could also be a national security risk.
Last year the Department of Energy announced a $15m (£11.58m) project to recycle lithium-ion batteries in an attempt to reduce reliance on source countries for the minerals and on the countries that do the bulk of the recycling.
One industry-led plan would give each battery a "passport", allowing everyone in the supply chain to know its chemical make-up, making the recycling process more efficient.
"If recyclers are aware of the chemistry categories, it allows them to segregate batteries and avoid the cost of testing as well as increase the market value of the materials once recycled," says Mathy Stanislaus, of the Global Battery Alliance, an industry group.
There's also international pressure to make batteries cheaper and reduce their cobalt content, in part to make them more widely used but also to reduce the reliance on "artisanal" mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which have poor safety records and use child labour.
But this could have unintended consequences for the recycling industry, warns Whitacre.
"People are simply trying to design battery materials that don't need any or need very little cobalt. It went from being 33pc cobalt, to 15pc cobalt to 10pc cobalt, and now they're talking about 5pc, or zero percent cobalt, just get rid of it.
"But of course, cobalt is the most valuable metal in the battery. And so as we get rid of it, we have less impetus to recycle from an economic perspective."
Tesla, the company which pushed the rest of the industry to take electric vehicles seriously, has its own plan to deal with the battery problem.
In his 2006 master plan for an electric revolution, Elon Musk gave the battery disposal problem short shrift. "Dumping them in the trash would be throwing money away, since the battery pack can be sold to recycling companies (unsubsidised) at the end of its greater than 100,000-mile design life".
It says it does not yet have many batteries reaching the end of their lives, but last year announced plans to establish a recycling centre at its Nevada Gigafactory to create its own "closed-loop" system.
Further detail is not forthcoming, but last year former chief technology officer JB Straubel stepped back from his role in order to focus on his recycling startup Redwood Materials – a sign that in his eyes at least, Musk's masterplan continues to hold.
'The inclination is not to do too much,' Forsyth Barr analyst Peter Sigley said.