you can tell as he thinks batteries are disposed of.
He knows most batteries are disposed of. About 5% on average, of consumer batteries are recycled. Lead acid car batteries run about 90%. Lithium batteries are low because we haven't got a large scale way of recycling the litium and it costs about 7 times what mined stuff does it's improving though. Part of the problem is you need about 98% purity to put it back into batteries and most processes so far get about 70%. There is a promising process but it requires quite a lot of manual work, which is a bit risky to humans.
It's possible to recycle nuclear fuel, unless it's from a candu reactor. Around 4 countries do it. The US doesnt. They bury and they've got a lot. Thank Obama for that. It's not really economic though.
There's a plant sucessfully recycling lithium car batteries in France, it's been on the news. Yes it's labour intensive, the risks to humans are well mangaged and the main thing they lack is batteries to recycle because most of them are still in cars. All they've got to work with at present is the ones from accident damaged cars because even the batteries from the first Zoés and Leafs are still in use either in the cars or as energy storage.
The Hague site in France deals with most of Europes nuclear waste. What proportion is recycled I don't know. The objective is the highest proportion possible because the nation that sends it gets the unrecyclable nasites back to deal with themselves.
I suspect you are talking about the Veolia plant. They reclaim the materials but most get used in other things e.g.to make metals for various industries. They don't go into new batteries. So it is more a reuse than recycle.
Did you actually read the link to the end drac? Says pretty much the same thing. So you still have cobalt mining in DRC which is an environmental and human disaster. Lithium is still mined in bolivia which uses about 2 million litres of water per tonne, pollutes agricultural land and water and displaces farmers. Because we cannot yet make new batteries without new material. We may be able to at some point. It may even becomes economic. Most EVs don't sell without significant subsidies to manufacturing or end users from govts. When those disappear the market tanks.
I think EVs are the future but to say they are eco friendly ignores the background to them. I think despite the drawbacks the small ICE engine powering electric motors was the way to go. If they'd been pursued more vigorously we'd all be driving them now, putting out 10% of the pollution. Instead we aimed for 0% and still aren't there. And won't be for some time to come. Never let perfection drive out the good, eh?
Something that frustrates me about all this is just how woolly the debate is made, especially by those who should know better. The BBC article is poor quality and while Harry points out a calculation to show gCO2 per mile for electric, he goes on to compare a full lifecycle gCO2 per mile for electric with tailpipe only emissions for ICE.
Harry (caveat, I didn't watch every second of that video) needs to compare full lifecycle emissions for both, covering mining, extraction, refinement and transport of fuel, whether that's liquid or electricity. And of course manufacturing of the car too. EVs are far from perfect, and of course the perfect answer would involve a dramatic reduction in car miles travelled, but they're vastly better on this than ICE. ICE lifecycle emissions looked at this way are I understand it 3-4x BEV. PHEV in the right use case can be heading towards BEV but it depends heavily on the user's behaviour. Mild hybrid cannot be more than just a more efficient ICE, since whatever happens it's petrol in for miles out, with more miles achieved by regenerative braking and some improvement by avoiding using the ICE in traffic when it's least efficient, but that's it, and PHEV/BEV do the same anyway.
So moving from pure ICE to mild hybrid is an improvement, sure, but moving from mild hybrid to PHEV is another, and used correctly it can be a bigger one. So having the ITV hub hammer a Lexus advert every tdf highlights break illustrates another big issue of deeply cynical marketing. The "self charging hybrid" "you never have to plug in" "for those who see the bigger picture"... The words may be true but the clear implication is a lie.
On top of all this, so far every 70 plate car I've seen has been a big suv, and worse, the kind of 4x4 (or whatever) that no-one who actually needed a 4x4 would buy. Pure gas guzzling vanity objects that are in each case less useful and not safer, faster or anything much else than the equivalent normal format car. A sample size of ****** all but still a damning indictment on the importance folk here place on our environment.
Yes I’ve read that link before that’s how I knew about it. Are EVs 100% environmentally friendly of course not that’s near in impossible but no one has claimed that. More reuse than recycling? That’s what recycling is.
More reuse than recycling? That’s what recycling is
Then why is the phrase reduce - reuse - recycle, as if they are different things?
Seriously though as I alluded to in that post, you have to look at the two components. You could dispose of lithium, it's pretty inert, makes a useful drug, pretty safe. If you have vast amounts it might be a problem. But if you don't reclaim it, it isn't so bad. The heavy metals in the other hand you really want to keep them out of the environment. So reclaim/reuse/recycle.
The second and in some ways more important part is the other end. You need them to make batteries. We will need more as battery demand increases, not just in cars but phones, laptops, tablets, bike lights etc li ion are the battery. So if we cannot take every spent battery and get the component parts out and put them into new batteries then we have to keep digging them out of the ground. That is by far the bigger environmental problem. Which largely gets ignored. Is it more eco friendly than the alternatives? That's debatable. But the fact that it doesn't feature into the thinking of EV drivers is part of the green washing problem.
It's not Veolia, Chromollyolly. The quality of lithium recovered is useable in new batteries, they don't burn the batteries to recover the metals, they dissolve them:
I haven't found the French company I'm looking for but here's one in Quebec, 95% recovery of materials of a qualtity reuseable in batteries:
Then why is the phrase reduce – reuse – recycle, as if they are different things?
Because it’s catchy they’re not different recycling is reuse.
I think EVs are the future but to say they are eco friendly ignores the background to them.
EVs are more eco friendly. Cobalt mining in the DRC is not. Who is responsible nasty cobalt mining? Toyota, the mining companies or the DRC govt? Who needs to fix the situation?
Oil companies have done some pretty monstrous things over the years too don't forget.
They are different things! Reduce - use less. Reuse - you do not change the object - you use it again. Recycle - you reduce the object to its base materials and make a new object
Take water bottles
Reduce - you don't buy water in plastic bottles. You get it from the tap. Reuse - you buy a plastic bottle of water and you then use this bottle again. Recycle - you put your plastic bottle in the recycling bin and it is re-manufactured into another plastic object.
Thats why reduce, reuse recycle - its a hierarchy of reducing waste. Reduce is always the best way of reducing waste.
EVs (and phevs) right now are not suitable for many on an individual basis. But, they need to be adopted by some to help the money feed into the correct pots to fund the development.
A used modern petrol car is potentially a better solution on an individual basis as you are not feeding the supply chain of fossil fuel cars.
Now is the time (a number of years) to make the transition. There are many who still need an ICE car and many who should be changing to ev.
Nope - the only answer is to rebalance the economy away from motoring and on a polluter pays basis
EVs are more eco friendly. Cobalt mining in the DRC is not. Who is responsible nasty cobalt mining? Toyota, the mining companies or the DRC govt? Who needs to fix the situation?
Everyone has a role. No demand for cobalt, no problem in the DRC. EVs allow first world cities to have cleaner air at the cost of making parts of 2nd and 3rd world countries uninhabitable. Not what I'd call eco friendly.
The oil industry is bad but a) it is a mature industry and is a lot better environmentallly than it used to be. B) It also has the advantage that economic factors influence. Tarsands are an environmental disaster. Fortunately, they are only really viable when oil is >$80 barrel. So they aren't doing much and probably won't until venezuela is empty.
I haven’t found the French company I’m looking for but here’s one in Quebec, 95% recovery of materials of a qualtity reuseable in batteries:
Lithion are at the pilot plant stage. The problem I suspect they will run up against is when they try to scale up. So far there are a bunch of companies who can reclaim usable materials but only in a pilot scale. It either doesn't work at scale or is uneconomic. Like plasma gassification for waste. Every few years another company decides to have a crack at it. Pilots well. Doesn't scale. There is an Indian outfit iirc that is trialling orange peel as the extraction material. Works in the lab, makes reusable lithium. So get eating.
EDI in Moselle? (Which is a bit of a truck question because EDI are a subsidiary of Veolia but are known by their own name)
Thats why reduce, reuse recycle – its a hierarchy of reducing waste. Reduce is always the best way of reducing waste.
Oh! Hi TJ, not sure why you’re bringing reduce into this. Anyway recycling is reusing too either as the item as a whole or stripping it down to use its parts. We got here Cromoly seems to think EV batteries are disposed of, which they’re not.
Anyway bored now.
Lithion are at the pilot plant stage
600 batteries a year. The French unit is at about the same stage because as already stated they don't have enough batteries to get to existing capacity, more batteries will be available in a few years time.
An why the scepticism Chromollyolly? You just come across as anit-EV on all these threads and dream up new imaginary problems each time we prove your previous imaginary problem was rubbish. Turn your attention to ICE vehicles, you'll have far more success in proving that the 8 tonnes or so of fuel burnt in a ICE in its lifetime are unrecyclable and not recyled or reused. They're just turned into CO2, heat and air pollution. That's after extracting and refining by the super messy oil industry.
Where does the energy for your EV come from?
its energy usage that is the issue - not what form it is in
Where does the energy for your EV come from?
I could say the solar panels on the roof which produce more than my consumption including car charging and holiday accomodation, but in fact I reckon it's better to feed into the grid in the day when there's high demand and charge the car at night when demand is lower.
Drac - you said reduce. reuse, recycle was a hollow slogan and clearly you don't understand the difference between reuse and recycle. Recycle costs energy, Reuse does not.
you said reduce. reuse, recycle was a hollow slogan and clearly you don’t clearly you don't understand the difference between reuse and recycle. Recycle costs energy, Reuse does not.
No I didn’t. Stop lying. I said reuse is recycling.
Drac, it isn't the same, TJ and Molgrips are right. Reuse means to use the object as you find it, like the water bottle in his example. Recycling is what you do when you can no longer reuse something, you break it down and turn it into something else. They are very much not the same thing.
An why the scepticism Chromollyolly? You just come across as anit-EV on all these threads and dream up new imaginary problems each time we prove your previous imaginary problem was rubbish. T
Scepticism is a good idea when we are talking about claims around eco friendlyness. As I mentioned read up on plasma gassification as a solution to waste.
I'm not anti EV. I am against regarding EVs as a solution. Partly because they bring their own challenges - environmental and otherwise. If the problems I raise are imaginary then it isn't me who is imagining them. When you actually prove anything I've said not factual, we can discuss that. But you've put the battery ahead of the car again.
I think EVs have displace what would have been good, viable. Affordable alternatives. Not great but good. The EV market has been utterly distorted by interventions that had nothing to do with the environment. Which caused problems elsewhere. It's easy to ignore children digging up cobalt in mines polluted by uranium if it means I can live exactly as I did before but in an 'environmently friendly ' way. There will come a time when batteries are much better than they are now, including using different and much better materials. We aren't there yet and won't be for some time. So I don't view EVs as nearly as good as they are made out to be.
As an aside. One of the things that improvements in battery technology has done is made products viable where they weren't before. Take electric lawnmowers. Now you can have one with a battery instead of a lead. Very convenient but creates a problem that needn't exist.
You won't be ditching oil even when we are all driving EVs - you'll still need tyres and plastic.
It’s easy to ignore children digging up cobalt in mines polluted by uranium if it means I can live exactly as I did before but in an ‘environmently friendly ‘ way
But as I said - the polluting mines are not a requirement for EVs are they? Maybe instead of ditching the EV idea we should fix the problems with the mining? Why are there problems with mining? Because of careless or ineffective governments. I'm pretty sure there are kids working in awful conditions for other things that are not related to EVs, aren't there?
The risk is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Ta squirrelking
yeah this is Blue Peter level stuff really. It's a massively important distinction. Recycling is better than throwing something into landfill but it's not the goal.Reuse means to use the object as you find it, like the water bottle in his example. Recycling is what you do when you can no longer reuse something, you break it down and turn it into something else. They are very much not the same thing.
Really interesting thread. The bit that particularly resonates with me is about reducing the overall amount of miles that are travelled by car. It's all of the short journeys in built up areas that really frustrate me in particular. But I understand why it happens.. people want convenience and the incremental cost of that 1 or 2 mile round trip is so small in comparison to the total cost of car ownership it might as well be zero. This incremental cost is even smaller for EVs where with the right electricity tariff you can get down to almost 1ppm for fuel. I'm currently on a tariff not well suited to charging our EV but it's still only about 3.5ppm. There is absolutely no way on earth people's behaviour will change until it is hitting them in the pocket big time.. Even though the environmental cost now and for future generations is so blatant.
The behaviour is shocking really when you take a step back. We live in a small town on the outskirts of Newcastle with a lovely high street full of shops, restaurants, pubs, etc. but every single time I walk down there it is littered and I mean LITTERED with cars just dumped wherever the * people want.. bus stops.. zig zags for crossings.. you name it, if it's a car sized piece of tarmac (not even always tarmac actually) it will have a car on it. If I walk to the high street I might see 10 people walking but I'll easily see 300 cars.. obviously some will be travelling further but I'd bet a good deal of them of just driving to the high street and dumping their cars in the places I mentioned up there ^^^.
I absolutely despair, I really do.. There's a chap round the corner from me puts his dog in the boot of his car and drives less than 1km in a 4 litre V8 motor to the entrance to the woods.. madness. I'd say 75% + of other families we know drive SUVs "because of the kids". The guy round the corner who goes up and down our road about 10 times a day trying to extract maximum pops and bangs from his Golf GTi just for the craic. I could go on but it's depressing.
I'm not sure where I'm going with this other than venting (which I'm finding useful) but I just don't know where we go from here re. personal transport or how we improve things. It really gets me down and I'm by no means an eco-warrior.. I've moved from a thirsty petrol engined car to and EV and have significantly reduced the amount of miles I do but it's baby steps and the majority of people don't give a single solitary *.
It’s all of the short journeys in built up areas that really frustrate me in particular
It is frustrating because it's unnecessary, and is just a symptom of people's laziness, and I fully agree..
BUT
it doesn't actually use up that much fuel, even though it's less efficient, because the distances are small. My wife has to do the school run (don't ask) by car, for now, and she very infrequently fills up. When I was driving for work I got through much more fuel. And I'd guess that'd be dwarfed by the transport emissions derived from buying tat from China and flying fresh Asparagus in from Chile and so on.
I'm surprised no-one has mentioned the actual reason that so many new cars are hybrids - the latest European Fleet Emissions standards mean it will be practically impossible to sell a petrol-only car.
You could argue that this is government-driven greenwash that largely benefits automotive manufacturers and their supply chains (including a complete dependence on rare-earth minerals), but then people might accuse you of being a planet-killing conspiracy theorist.
Also - just to stick my oar into the ongoing debate - the unsustainble part of car ownership is the idea that every person can own a large motorized metal box that can take them perfectly clean and dry to any destination they wish, and not the fuel used to propel that box.
In all of this debate, it should be remembered that "CO2" is a proxy for "energy". Yes, CO2 is also a greenhouse gas, but IMHO we should largely be focussing on the enormous scale of personal energy usage. The amount of energy required to construct, operate, and maintain "green" energy sources (unless you include Nuclear), and then construct battery-powered EVs to take advantage of that "greenness", is considerable. The cost of an energy source is proportional to the energy required to construct it, so wind power is not free or cheap because the wind blows. This is the idea of "Energy returned on energy invested", or EROEI.
You could argue that this is government-driven greenwash that largely benefits automotive manufacturers and their supply chains
In the short term it does, and I'm sure the EU are well aware of this. But there is a long term aspect to this as well, isn't there?
Although the EU and the UK are only nudging behaviours at a small scale. As I've been saying all along, any really serious effort to reduce travel emissions would include a big incentive for companies to have their staff home-work. And we've seen during the pandemic how much of an economic restructure that would require.
To be honest I don't think any one of us is wrong, we are all coming to this from different directions but I don't thing many or indeed any of the overall arguments are factually incorrect.
@twrch you have probably summed up the modal shift argument that @tjagain was advocating whilst touching upon the greater sustainability argument. Fact is no one thing is a solution here and we require a raft of diverse measures to come up with a sustainable solution.
Sustainabikity in this context being resource, environmentally and economically based.
Fact is no one thing is a solution here and we require a raft of diverse measures to come up with a sustainable solution.
@squirrelking I don't mean to be rude, but that's how we end up nibbling at the edges of the problem (like mandated hybrid cars) without really getting into the meat of it (a complete change in the way the National Grid produces, stores, and supplies energy). IMHO, there are two solutions:
1. A radical (order of magnitude) reduction in personal energy usage, including all of the hidden energy cost in manufacturing everything we own (to give an idea, a laptop takes about 1,700kWh to manufacture, which is about what an EV would use to travel 5000 miles). Cars as personal transport do not fit into this solution, not even electric ones. A lithium battery pack takes approx. 400kWh of energy to manufacture per 1kWh of final battery capacity, so an 85kWh pack (as found in a Tesla S) takes 34,000 kWh to manufacture. In my opinion, the total energy efficiency of EVs is marginal at best.
2. Nuclear power.
The simple fact is that fossil fuels provide an enormous amount of energy quite cheaply, and energy economics based entirely on renewables like wind and solar would result in energy costs rising significantly. Transportation is also only about a third of the UK's energy usage (ignoring imported goods), so you'd also need to cover things like heating.
Just one more comment - the only way we call EVs or hybrid cars at all environmentally friendly is that we let dirty coal-burning countries do all the manufacturing, and pretend that our 25% wind/solar mix in the UK grid makes everything ok. Yes, I am a cynic.
So what's your solution then? Clear the countryside, move everyone into conurbations and have efficient mass transit as the only means of travel?
That's clearly impractical so we still need personal transport. How we provide motive power for that transport is not a one size fits all solution so we need a diverse energy mix for a) practical and b) sustainability reasons.
But yes, we need to radically change, tinkering with how we do business as usual isn't a solution.
So what’s your solution then?
Funny you should ask that, on a cycling forum! 😉
Personally, I think that the only realistic way to maintain anything like our current lifestyle without using fossil fuels is nuclear. That way, we also wouldn't need to faff about with the fluctuations of wind/solar and grid storage, etc.
Reduction in energy usage also can't hurt. If we all re-jigged our lives a bit so that cycling most places was viable, turned down the thermostat a degree or three, and stopped buying new electronics every year or two, that would save an enormous amount of energy.
Just for fun - here's a back of the envelope calculation. If you stopped driving 5000 miles a year and instead cycled 2500 miles, that's 1700kWh saved. I already gave the embodied energy of a laptop as 1700kWh. I'll just guesstimate some other typical electronics - if a mobile phone is half a laptop, a TV is 3 times a laptop, Apple Watch / Garmin is 1/4 a laptop, and cable box / hifi / everything else is another laptop, and we assume that people typically swap them out every 2 years, that's (1700 + (1/2 * 1700) + 3*1700 * (1/4 * 1700) + 1700) / 2 = 5000 kWh per year. Turning your heating down 2degC is another 3000kWh, so we'll call that 1000kWh per person. So, those behaviours save about 7500kWh per year per person. According to the internet, the average person in the UK uses about 33000 kWh per person per year, although I'm not sure if that includes the energy used to manufacture imported products. In any case - quite a significant impact, in relation to the average UK usage.
Clear the countryside, move everyone into conurbations and have efficient mass transit as the only means of travel?
Why do we need to all be in cities? Clearly many of us don't.
What we have seen in the pandemic is only a small part of what's possible, with regards redistributing where we do our work.
Carbon tax based economy. All taxation is based around the CO2 production.
Why do we need to all be in cities? Clearly many of us don’t.
Which was my entire point 😉
Yes it would make things more efficient but its totally impractical.
Carbon tax based economy. All taxation is based around the CO2 production.
Why not resource based? CO2 production isn't the be all and end all especially if its still supporting an unsustainable lifestyle.
Which was my entire point 😉
Yes it would make things more efficient but its totally impractical.
You appear to be saying both that we don't all need to be in cities, but it's impractical if we're not - that seems contradictory.
Anyway - make it practical. It needs to be done.
Why not resource based? CO2 production isn’t the be all and end all especially if its still supporting an unsustainable lifestyle.
Resource based is more complex and co2 is a decent indicator of resource use. Make it pollutter pays tho and make all taxation based around the amount of pollution created. could be em beded energy as well.
CO2 based taxation has the beauty of simplicity
Carbon tax based economy. All taxation is based around the CO2 production.
In theory, all things being equal, things that take more energy to manufacture will cost more. It's very skewed in practice by international trade, and government incentives. Using the numbers I gave above, there's a lot of incentives to buy an electric car, when they require a lot more energy to manufacture.
You appear to be saying both that we don’t all need to be in cities, but it’s impractical if we’re not – that seems contradictory.
First bit is right but the second is the wrong way round. It would be utterly impractical for everyone to live in the same area.
Resource based is more complex and co2 is a decent indicator of resource use. Make it pollutter pays tho and make all taxation based around the amount of pollution created. could be em beded energy as well.
Embedded energy starts getting tricky though and doesnt take other pollution or environmental factors into account. It doesn't factor the use of finite resources either.
As said, there is no silver bullet, you can pick the same holes in resource based as it doesn't factor how those resources are extracted.
CO2 based taxation has the beauty of simplicity
I think we're in the shit now because politicians have promised us simple solutions to complex problems...So; rich people get to continue a polluting lifestyle filled with convenience and luxury, international flying and so on, and poor people don't, brilliantly simple...
But these rich people pay multiple times the taxation which then creates surplus which can be used to mitigate issues
