What is a battery?' I think Nikola
Tesla said it best when he called it an Energy Storage System. That's
an important distinction.
They do not make electricity – they store electricity produced
elsewhere, primarily by coal, uranium, natural gas-powered plants, or
diesel-fueled generators. So, to say an EV is a zero-emission vehicle
is not at all valid.
Also, since forty percent of the electricity generated in the U.S. is
from coal-fired plants, it follows that forty percent of the EVs on the
road are coal-powered, do you see?
Einstein's formula, E=MC2, tells us it takes the same amount of energy
to move a five-thousand-pound gasoline-driven automobile a mile as it
does an electric one. The only question again is what produces the
power? To reiterate, it does not come from the battery; the battery is
only the storage device, like a gas tank in a car.
There are two orders of batteries, rechargeable, and single-use. The
most common single-use batteries are A, AA, AAA, C, D. 9V, and lantern
types. Those dry-cell species use zinc, manganese, lithium, silver
oxide, or zinc and carbon to store electricity chemically. Please note
they all contain toxic, heavy metals.
Rechargeable batteries only differ in their internal materials, usually
lithium-ion, nickel-metal oxide, and nickel-cadmium. The United States
uses three billion of these two battery types a year, and most are not
recycled; they end up in landfills. California is the only state which
requires all batteries be recycled. If you throw your small, used
batteries in the trash, here is what happens to them.
All batteries are self-discharging. That means even when not in use,
they leak tiny amounts of energy. You have likely ruined a flashlight
or two from an old, ruptured battery. When a battery runs down and can
no longer power a toy or light, you think of it as dead; well, it is
not. It continues to leak small amounts of electricity. As the
chemicals inside it run out, pressure builds inside the battery's metal
casing, and eventually, it cracks. The metals left inside then ooze
out. The ooze in your ruined flashlight is toxic, and so is the ooze
that will inevitably leak from every battery in a landfill. All
batteries eventually rupture; it just takes rechargeable batteries
longer to end up in the landfill.
In addition to dry cell batteries, there are also wet cell ones used in
automobiles, boats, and motorcycles. The good thing about those is,
ninety percent of them are recycled. Unfortunately, we do not yet know
how to recycle single-use ones properly.
But that is not half of it. For those of you excited about electric
cars and a green revolution, I want you to take a closer look at
batteries and also windmills and solar panels. These three technologies
share what we call environmentally destructive embedded costs.
Everything manufactured has two costs associated with it, embedded
costs and operating costs. I will explain embedded costs using a can of
baked beans as my subject.
In this scenario, baked beans are on sale, so you jump in your car and
head for the grocery store. Sure enough, there they are on the shelf
for $1.75 a can. As you head to the checkout, you begin to think about
the embedded costs in the can of beans.
The first cost is the diesel fuel the farmer used to plow the field,
till the ground, harvest the beans, and transport them to the food
processor. Not only is his diesel fuel an embedded cost, so are the
costs to build the tractors, combines, and trucks. In addition, the
farmer might use a nitrogen fertilizer made from natural gas.
Next is the energy costs of cooking the beans, heating the building,
transporting the workers, and paying for the vast amounts of
electricity used to run the plant. The steel can holding the beans is
also an embedded cost. Making the steel can requires mining taconite,
shipping it by boat, extracting the iron, placing it in a coal-fired
blast furnace, and adding carbon. Then it's back on another truck to
take the beans to the grocery store. Finally, add in the cost of the
gasoline for your car.
A typical EV battery weighs one thousand pounds, about the size of a
travel trunk. It contains twenty-five pounds of lithium, sixty pounds
of nickel, 44 pounds of manganese, 30 pounds cobalt, 200 pounds of
copper, and 400 pounds of aluminum, steel, and plastic. Inside are over
6,000 individual lithium-ion cells.
It should concern you that all those toxic components come from mining.
For instance, to manufacture each EV auto battery, you must process
25,000 pounds of brine for the lithium, 30,000 pounds of ore for the
cobalt, 5,000 pounds of ore for the nickel, and 25,000 pounds of ore
for copper. All told, you dig up 500,000 pounds of the earth's crust
for just one battery."
Sixty-eight percent of the world's cobalt, a significant part of a
battery, comes from the Congo. Their mines have no pollution controls,
and they employ children who die from handling this toxic material.
Should we factor in these diseased kids as part of the cost of driving
an electric car?"
I'd like to leave you with these thoughts. California is building the
largest battery in the world near San Francisco, and they intend to
power it from solar panels and windmills. They claim this is the
ultimate in being 'green,' but it is not! This construction project is
creating an environmental disaster. Let me tell you why.
The main problem with solar arrays is the chemicals needed to process
silicate into the silicon used in the panels. To make pure enough
silicon requires processing it with hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid,
nitric acid, hydrogen fluoride, trichloroethane, and acetone. In
addition, they also need gallium, arsenide, copper-indium-gallium-
diselenide, and cadmium-telluride, which also are highly toxic.
Silicone dust is a hazard to the workers, and the panels cannot be
recycled.
Windmills are the ultimate in embedded costs and environmental
destruction. Each weighs 1688 tons (the equivalent of 23 houses) and
contains 1300 tons of concrete, 295 tons of steel, 48 tons of iron, 24
tons of fiberglass, and the hard to extract rare earths neodymium,
praseodymium, and dysprosium. Each blade weighs 81,000 pounds and will
last 15 to 20 years, at which time it must be replaced. We cannot
recycle used blades. Sadly, both solar arrays and windmills kill birds,
bats, sea life, and migratory insects.
There may be a place for these technologies, but you must look beyond
the myth of zero emissions. I predict EVs and windmills will be
abandoned once the embedded environmental costs of making and replacing
them become apparent. "Going Green" may sound like the Utopian ideal
and are easily espoused, catchy buzzwords, but when you look at the
hidden and embedded costs realistically with an open mind, you can see
that Going Green is more destructive to the Earth's environment than
meets the eye, for sure.
Source: The Embedded Costs of Going Green
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ENVIRONMENT
