14 Electric Cars Need A Little Help to Become Truly “Green” – Marie Pearson

Electric vehicles (EVs) have come a long way from the vehicles they were merely 15 years ago, when they were still regarded as cheap, vapid inventions whose chances at replacing their fossil-fueled cousins were utterly hopeless. There was even a documentary in 2006, “Who Killed the Electric Car?”, that predicted their doom (Podder and Grover, 2019). The public’s lack of faith in these cars didn’t make environmentalists cower, however. They brought awareness to consumers, and the groups pressed electric vehicle industries to roll out better, more efficient, more climate-friendly EVS. The industry responded by creating popular brands such as the Tesla series or the Nissan Leaf. EV’s are widely regarded as the solution to addressing climate change; they’re thought to be capable of reducing or even stopping the greenhouse gasses emitted by our transportation sector since they produce zero emissions when driving. Today, these vehicles stand a real chance of rendering gas-powered cars obsolete. But have they reached their full potential yet? The answer: not quite. It is their production, in factories and with non-renewable resources, that stop them from having a zero carbon footprint. Their batteries are created through the mining of raw materials, and are toxic to the earth and atmosphere when discarded; the materials used to make them are quite heavy, leading to high CO2 emissions during their processing; and lastly, the global transportation of their parts is massively polluting within itself. It should be disclaimed that EV’s will not be completely climate friendly until their source of electricity can come from renewable sources and not coal plants. However, for this paper, the focused argument is with the problems that arise from their production stage. Electric vehicles, though desired by environmentalists, are not as environmentally friendly as they may seem. Both their problems and the possible solutions are rooted within their production. All of these issues with EVs can be solved through large-scale production policy reform.

Undoubtedly, EVs seem environmentally friendly when only the emissions produced while driving the car are considered. There are over 5.6 million electric vehicles worldwide as of 2022. Currently, that only makes up for 3% of car sales. By 2025, it’s predicted that EVs will reach 10% of car sales, 28% by 2030, and 58% by 2040 (Kopestinksky, 2022). Their fuel economy improves with every new model that’s released; the 2023 Tesla Model X, for example, can achieve a range of up to 405 miles on a full charge, while the average gas-powered vehicle can go around 350 miles on a full tank of gas (Butterworth). EVs are becoming more affordable as well. Teslas, for example, can cost as little as $46,990 (Find My Electric, 2022). In comparison, the average cost of a gas-powered car today is $47,000 (Meyer, 2022). With climate change becoming an increasingly relevant problem, these cars are commonly hailed as one of its most promising solutions. Their popularity is certainly on the rise.

Because EVs produce zero carbon dioxide CO2 emissions, it can be easy to believe that they are one hundred percent “green” cars. This belief is false, however, because it does not account for the embodied energy emissions of EVs. Embodied energy emissions, as explained by Harvard, are  “the sum of all the energy required to produce a product (including raw materials extraction, assembly, and transportation of the product), treating that energy as though it was incorporated or ’embodied’ in the product itself” (Podder and Grover, 2019). Therefore, the production of batteries, the assembly of the EV parts, and the transportation it takes to get them to the factories would be considered their embodied energy emissions. Therefore, in order to make EVs truly environmentally friendly, the goal must be to eliminate, or at the very least minimize, these embodied energy emissions.

First, one of the biggest criticisms with EVs is the way their batteries are produced — through the mining of raw materials, most notably, lithium. In order to extract it, thousands of gallons of water are pumped into salt flats, bringing mineral-rich saltwater to the surface. Then, lithium is filtered out of the powdery mixture that is left behind once the water evaporates (Sheldon, 2022). The use of water to extract lithium is problematic due to both the amount used and the potential it carries to contaminate local water supplies. More than half of the Earth’s lithium supply can be found in the Lithium Triangle found near Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile. According to the United Nations, this area is one of the driest places in the world, and lithium mining consumes as much as 65% of their water (UNCTAD, 2020). All of these factors make battery production the most environmentally damaging stage of EV production. Research by the European Environment Agency (EEA) states that batteries alone account for up to 70% of the greenhouse gas emissions resulting from the entire production of the EV (Sheldon, 2022).

Ideally, a battery that doesn’t require such intensive mining of raw materials (or no mining at all) will be developed in the future. Until then, the most obvious solution to this problem is to recycle lithium batteries as often as possible. The problem is that it is estimated that less than 5% of them are. This is because EV batteries are not currently designed to be recycled or reused (Marchant, 2021). In order to begin recycling batteries, the first step would be to reform lithium battery production policies by putting an emphasis on making them recyclable. Among a few companies working towards this goal are the Nevada-based Redwood Materials and United-Kingdom based Aceleron. Redwood Materials hopes to create a “closed-loop” supply chain by retrieving and recirculating raw material from end-of-life lithium batteries. They burn the batteries to remove unwanted materials and plastics, and then soak the lithium-ion cells in acid that dissolves the metals into a solution (Marchant, 2021). This process of battery deconstruction can be extensive and costly, however. That’s where Aceleron comes in. Aceleron is creating what it says are the “world’s most sustainable lithium battery packs” (Marchant, 2021). “The reason why we have such a challenge today with reusing a lot of batteries is actually that many of them were not made with the next stage of their life in mind,” Aceleron co-founder and CTO Carlton Cummings told The Telegraph. Therefore, Aceleron’s goal is to make their batteries easy to disassemble, which will encourage recycling and support this closed-loop supply chain. Companies should take note of what these groups are doing and begin adopting aspects of their work. It should become commonplace for battery manufacturers to prioritize their batteries’ recyclability like Aceleron is. Then, at the end of a battery’s life, it would be ideal to establish ways for batteries to be collected from the car owner’s residence and taken to companies like Redwood Materials to be recycled.

Another reason why the embodied energy emissions of EVs is higher than it should be is because the materials used in making them are quite heavy. Their acquisition, transportation, and processing leads to unideal CO2 emissions. Currently, the traditional and heavier materials used to make EVs include lithium, cobalt, manganese, and nickel. Again, acquiring these materials isn’t sustainable because it requires mining (Podder and Grover, 2019). They are also all quite dense which requires more heavy-duty, therefore more polluting, transportation. Processing requires similarly heavy-duty machinery because of the weight of these metals. 1 cubic foot of cobalt weighs 555 pounds; 1 cubic foot of manganese weighs 464 pounds; and 1 cubic foot of nickel weighs 556 pounds (Aqua Calc)!

To make EVs environmentally friendly, methods need to be devised that reduce the amount of heavy materials required to make them. One of these methods is known as lightweighting: making products lighter by reducing the amount of materials used in them. To lightweight EVs, companies need to transition to lighter materials. A Harvard study on material science found that some cellulose and carbon-fiber composites, as well as lab-synthesized polymers like polypropylene, polyurethane, and polyvinyl chloride, are strong enough but also light enough to achieve these goals. These composites can be used for approximately 66% of EV parts and can reduce the weight of a vehicle by 15 to 30% (Podder and Grover, 2019). Making cars out of these light materials could easily be a game-changer in reducing the embodied energy emissions of EVs, but once more, it only becomes effective if it’s introduced and implemented at a commercial scale.

One of the final but equally harmful contributors of EV embodied emissions is the transportation of their batteries and parts. A report by the United States International Trade Commission found that the United States was the “second highest importer of lithium ion batteries from 2013 to 2017, with $2.5 billion worth of lithium-ion batteries imported in 2017 itself” (Coffin and Horowitz, 2018). The environmental cost of this lies within emissions from the container ships that transport them. It’s easy to fall into the “out of sight, out of mind” mindset when it comes to these super-sized ships and oil tankers. After all, the large majority of what they do occurs far out at sea, where nobody is around, no laws apply, and the only concern is with maximizing profits. Most vessels function on “bunker oil”, a thick, sludgy product that’s left over after petroleum has been broken down by oil refineries. It is similar to road tar in which it’s so thick that it can’t flow out of storage tanks and into ships’ engines unless it’s super-heated (Hanley, 2018). It contains dangerously high concentrations of zinc, mercury, arsenic, and other elements that can be detrimental to human health. Bunker oil contains high levels of sulfur as well. When the fumes mix with the moisture in the ocean air, it creates an atmosphere of sulfuric acid. There are thousands and thousands of these ships coughing out poisonous cocktails in their wake. The UK-based website Inews estimates that just one of these container ships is the length of roughly 6 football fields, and can produce the same amount of pollution as 50 million cars. “The emissions from 15 of these mega-ships match those from all the cars in the world,” it reports, “and if the shipping industry were a country, it would be ranked between Germany and Japan as the sixth-largest contributor to global CO2 emissions” (Piesing, 2018). Though they don’t often come near civilization, a study published by Nature in 2018 found that the pollution from these ships still causes roughly 400,000 premature deaths each year. It also found that they’re responsible for an estimated 14,000,000 cases of childhood asthma (Hanley, 2018).

While emissions from these massive fleets don’t come from the hauling of EV components alone, producing batteries and EV parts at local factories would assist in reducing these emissions. One promising part of this solution has sprung up right here in the United States. Tesla’s Gigafactory, a massive EV assembly factory that is entirely solar powered, has begun to produce lithium-ion batteries. The factory produces enough batteries to power about 1.3 million cars per year. Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla, hopes that in the next few years the Gigafactory will be able to supply 100% of car batteries to electric cars in the United States (Fortuna, 2022). Therefore, the United States would no longer need to import batteries but only source raw materials from global trade; thus, it would decrease the emissions that the US spends on heavy battery transport. If factories like the Gigafactory establish themselves in other countries and go for the same goal– no longer needing to import their EV batteries — the world would be able to reduce emissions from battery transport on a global scale. Elon Musk even said in an interview that he estimates it would only take 100 Gigafactories worldwide to solve the transportation sector’s part in climate change (Before the Flood). Ideally, these factories would be able to be built on land that has already been established for commercial use; cutting down forests to build them would be counter-productive, after all, if the goal is to help the environment. Once more, real change can only be made if producing batteries on a strictly local scale becomes a commonplace policy.

EVs cannot be made green by just one or two simple tweaks to the system. Reducing their embodied energy emissions requires corporate and government support to ensure success because of how large-scale the reforms must be. Practices that need to be established include the creation of easily recyclable batteries (as well as a program that ensures they are recycled at the end of their life), an implementation of lighter and more environmentally friendly materials within EV framework, and globally sourced but locally produced batteries and other EV components. Doing all of these things to reduce embodied energy emissions from EVs, and combining them with making daily environmentally conscious decisions on an individual level, and humanity can be boosted towards its ultimate goal of creating a fully low-carbon world.

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