Growth In Electric Vehicles Leads To Battery Waste Mountain

Without recycling, electric vehicle batteries could lead to mountains of waste

In the first half of 2019 more than a million electric cars were sold globally, which is the same number of EVs sold across the globe in the year 2017. Even if the accelerated growth is a piece of excellent news for climate change and air quality, but as we all know, everything has pros as well as cons and same is the case with this massive growth in EVs.

Even though there’s no such thing as a mountain of EV waste, but, the number of electric vehicles that are set to be marketed this year across the globe offers chances of generating battery waste more than 500,000 tonnes, which is five times compared to the weight of all compact batteries that get recycled annually in the European Union.

Laura Driscoll, University of Birmingham, UK says "It's a challenge because most current generation batteries aren't designed for recycling. If the battery packs were more of a standard design, it would make the process at end-of-life much easier." According to her, the lithium-ion car batteries can pose a safety and environmental risk if they are not recycled. 

For instance, Tesla's premium vehicles employees packs of cylindrical battery cells and they are even combined into a battery module in a few cases, which makes them difficult to detach and recycle. However, the carmaker claims to improve this issue. Moreover, the majority of EV batteries are capable of lasting for 15 to 20 years. 

Jonathan Radcliffe at the University of Birmingham said "That could be a growing time bomb, especially if things take off quickly. [Carmakers] are a bit conflicted because they want a competitive advantage, to make the batteries as cheap and high-performance as they can. That might not always align with making them in a certain set of standards."