Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/05/07/one-of-earths-rarest-wildflowers-is-in-the-crosshairs-of-a-lithium-mining-juggernaut.html
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I can’t help but feel mass battery production is just swapping one bad thing for another…
Question - I don’t know how these batteries wear out. Is lithium consumed in the process? Will there be a point where if all cars have batteries, we can recycle the lithium in them even when the batteries wear out?
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We could stop building new cars today, and still have enough cars to last us decades. Look at Cuba.
We don’t need to keep building new cars, just rebuilding the ones we already have. Rebuilt engines and transmissions.
This would cut the carbon footprint of our planet down significantly. It’s crazy how much energy it takes to build a car; mining, refining, machining 10,000-20,000 parts per car, transporting parts around the globe to assemble larger parts, then moving those parts, to assemble cars, then transporting the assembled car.
Get people into busses and public transportation.
Stop buying stuff.
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“The battery pack of a Tesla Model S is a feat of intricate engineering. Thousands of cylindrical cells with components sourced from around the world transform lithium and electrons into enough energy to propel the car hundreds of kilometers, again and again, without tailpipe emissions. But when the battery comes to the end of its life, its green benefits fade. If it ends up in a landfill, its cells can release problematic toxins, including heavy metals. And recycling the battery can be a hazardous business, warns materials scientist Dana Thompson of the University of Leicester. Cut too deep into a Tesla cell, or in the wrong place, and it can short-circuit, combust, and release toxic fumes.“
Lithium can be recycled. But it looks like designing the batteries to be recycled hasn’t been investigated much at all.
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Funny how this article talks about mining more lithium like a vital part of saving the environment, to the point where sacrifices might be necessary, but that article calls it too cheap to even care about in recycling. Somehow I get the feeling the environment isn’t really the priority in what these companies are doing.
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It’s never a question of “Can this be recycled?” It’s a question of “Is this so cheap and easy to recycle that the old whatever-it-is has positive value?” For something like aluminum cans, the answer is yes; for plastic, the answer has historically been no; for lithium, it depends strongly on the form factor of the batteries.
Some are easy to disassemble, but many–including Tesla’s–were designed to be assembly-only. Makes 'em cheaper, but this makes them very expensive to meaningfully recycle. You basically have to incinerate them and recover the lithium from the ash. Toxicologically speaking, a lot can go wrong doing that.
Shel Evergreen wrote a good article about this back in 2022: Lithium costs a lot of money—so why aren’t we recycling lithium batteries? | Ars Technica
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I’d like to live in a country where the question of whether public lands should be given to a private company to exploit would be unimaginable.
The notion that mining more lithium aligns with conservation is absurd. The sooner we wholly reject the notion of 2-ton personal conveyance, the better. There is no battery technology that could ever make that a good idea.
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I don’t understand how you can mine tons of ore for the very small percentage of metal you want inside, and yet you have battery waste that has a bunch of lithium in it that is more difficult to extract.
I guess it’s the other components of the battery making the process you would refine ore with unusable.
NSFW.
Joey Santore called it, 2+ years ago, and the situation sucks.
(more info from his Youtube episode:)
To help save this species (and force Ioneer to put their open pit mine somewhere else nearby where the biological impact will be less devastating) please check out the following link:
https://act.biologicaldiversity.org/mXJFO4eqfkCur18m830AZQ2[this link goes to a page that says submissions time is closed]Eriogonum tiehmii is a rare buckwheat known from a remote little corner of Nevada. It is an edaphic specialist, which means it is restricted to a special type of soil rich in lithium and boron, having evolved a very specific and special ability to be able to tolerate these generally barren white chalky soils of the high desert. This plant’s affinity for these kinds of soils maybe what ultimately dooms it, as %70 of its population is due to be wiped out by a proposed open-pit lithium mine that an Australian mining company named Ioneer wants to develop on the site. If it passes, this plant would be doomed and this beautiful and geologically interesting area would be scarred forever.
See also:
ETA2:
ETA: fuck capitalism
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You’ve got it.
As a concrete example: these guys roast to 1050 degrees C and dissolve-with-acid rocks that are 75%+ spodumene, which corresponds to 6% LiO2: https://www.sgs.com/-/media/sgscorp/documents/corporate/brochures/sgs-min-wa109-hard-rock-lithium-processing-en.cdn.en.pdf . Implicit in this is the other stuff in there doesn’t do anything interesting as a result; it stays more-or-less oblivious rock, which can then be dumped somewhere–or possibly be worth a little as a cement in concrete production, if https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0958946523003360 pans out.
If you tried that with a battery pulled straight from a car or a laptop, the heat would turn the plastic into a mix of goo, fire, and toxic smoke, and then the sulphuric acid would turn it into SULPHUROUS goo and toxic smoke.
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I so love him. Missed that video though. Off to check it out.
Thx
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He’s giving a talk in Austin (TX) this Saturday and I’m going.
He’s such a fiercely articulate lover and defender of the natural world. We need 1000 more like him.
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