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(Photo: Getty Images)
(Photo: Getty Images)

SocietyJuly 5, 2021

Powerful fictions (and some facts): The truth about the harms of EV batteries

(Photo: Getty Images)
(Photo: Getty Images)

Electric vehicles are growing in popularity, but there are frequent claims the batteries in them aren’t up to snuff. Andrea Graves sets the record straight.

The electric vehicle feebate announcement has spurred keyboard warriors to “educate” others on the harms of EV batteries. Environmental and human rights advocates have emerged from unexpected quarters: Winston Peters is concerned about labour conditions in African mines and joins Judith Collins in fretting about a looming stockpile of depleted EV batteries. 

These alarming claims deserve more than research via social media. Are they true?  

Fiction: EV batteries will form a waste mountain

The worried politicians could turn to New Zealand’s Battery Industry Group (BIG), a stakeholder group of businesses, individuals, organisations and academics from energy, transport, waste and battery sectors. It’s committed to avoiding a large-battery legacy problem and co-designed a circular product stewardship scheme that is now with the Ministry for the Environment. 

If the scheme becomes a regulation, all large batteries will have their chain of custody tracked after import. Their life expectancy varies by make, but the life of a Nissan Leaf’s relatively small and faster-degrading battery might look like this: five years with an owner who needs a long-range vehicle, who sells to someone who’s willing to charge up more often, who after another five years sells cheaply to someone who only tootles around town. A few years later, its remaining capacity can remain useful for a “second life” outside a car. Counties Power, for example, will shortly install ex-Nissan Leaf batteries to store electricity to cover outages and voltage fluctuations in remote locations. It’s also working on a battery bank to store off-peak electricity to power EV charging stations. 

Fiction: EV batteries aren’t recyclable

BIG proposes collecting a fee when a battery is imported, which would fund the dissemination of batteries for second-life uses or recycling. Dr Peng Cao of the MacDiarmid Institute and the University of Auckland says that EV batteries are completely recyclable – but it’s not profitable and existing methods are polluting. Local recycling options are being explored, and nationwide scrap dealer Metalman hopes to soon offer a recycling service for all common battery types. 

Electric vehicles charging at a station in Newmarket, Auckland (Photo: Supplied)

Fact: EV batteries (and all electronics) contain toxic materials

All electronic gear, from cellphones to televisions and electric toothbrushes, includes materials that can be toxic. Like oil, the materials are extracted from somewhere on the planet, and the resulting environmental destruction is comfortably distanced from our shopping experience. EV battery metals are no exception, but there is a mammoth push to do better.

“Developing environmentally friendly, less toxic batteries is a really hot research topic globally,” says Cao, who is part of this effort. “The second generation of EVs tried to minimise the use of cobalt. Now producers are trying to move away from it altogether. And the new chemistry batteries should be cheaper.”

A battery based on aluminium, an abundant and less toxic metal, is being developed by Wellington startup TasmanION.

Fact: Children mine cobalt for batteries (and oil refining etc)

This is true and troubling. About 40,000 children are thought to be involved in dangerous, unregulated mining in Democratic Republic of Congo. Poverty drives their families to it. The most valuable metal they unearth is cobalt – the same metal battery manufacturers are trying to retire from their products. International coalitions are working to improve the conditions that drive children to work in the mines and to source less exploitative cobalt from the murky supply chain.

But before you throw stones in a cobalt revolt, check whether you’re living in a glass house. Cobalt is also used in oil refining, the superalloys of aircraft engines and prosthetic joints. And do you own gold, drink coffee, eat chocolate, sugar or bananas or wear cotton? These are some of the products produced by an estimated 160 million children who labour in often dangerous conditions.

There are also valid concerns about rechargeable batteries’ other metals, particularly lithium. Again, there’s a huge research thrust to address that, with a local company at the cutting edge.

Fiction: EVs generate more carbon dioxide than conventional cars

Many “lifecycle assessments” have calculated the carbon dioxide produced to build, use and dispose of vehicles. They consistently show that although more carbon emissions are generated by EVs than conventional cars during manufacturing, EV lifespan emissions are much lower after a few months or years of average driving (it’s faster for smaller EVs and in countries like ours where renewable electricity predominates). 

Fiction: EVs are pointless if we’re burning coal

It’s not intuitive, but even where a substantial proportion of electricity is generated from coal, such as in AustraliaEVs almost always result in lower carbon emissions than conventional vehicles. That’s because internal combustion engines are so inefficient, converting less than 30% of petrol’s energy into power at the wheels. EV batteries convert nearly 80% of grid energy into wheel power. And more renewable electricity is imminent here.

So what should an ethical driver do?

All vehicles step heavily on the planet, so an advocate for the environment and human rights would, whenever possible, use a less taxing option such as their feet, a bike or public transport. 

It’s exhausting to examine how every purchase impacts distant people and environments, but it’s only fair to compare apples with apples. A fair player would balance concerns about child labour and environmental harm from battery metals with the injustices they fund with their other purchases. They would factor in the pollution, corruption and wars that result from relying on oil. 

They would weigh up battery issues against the vast suffering to be inflicted on billions of future humans and other species by the continuing massive blow-out in atmospheric carbon dioxide caused by burning fossil fuels. The resulting three or more degrees of warming predicted by 2100 seems measly (we’re already at one degree), but there is little doubt the consequences will be profound. 

The sea will engulf many cities. Widespread heatwaves, drought, famine, intense storms, fires and severe economic depression are inevitable unless we cut carbon emissions deeply and rapidly. Transport produces nearly half of New Zealand’s carbon dioxide emissions, and although EVs are imperfect, they’re a ready-to-roll way to start eradicating those emissions. 

This article was updated on July 8 to clarify the coal vs EV comparison.

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three houses with sky behind them. they are pretty victorian terraces but looking at them you feel almost certain that they are cold, expensive, and damp. it's just a vibe
Photo: Getty Images

OPINIONSocietyJuly 5, 2021

How protecting Wellington’s character homes is leaving tenants out in the cold

three houses with sky behind them. they are pretty victorian terraces but looking at them you feel almost certain that they are cold, expensive, and damp. it's just a vibe
Photo: Getty Images

Despite being mostly damp and unstable, Wellington’s character homes have long been fiercely protected. But as tenants advocate Ashok Jacob argues, their loudest proponents aren’t the ones that need protecting the most.

Despite extensive coverage in the national media, Wellington’s spatial plan debate could seem confusing to outside observers. For example, I can see why it might come as a surprise to learn that the loudest campaigners for what is essentially mass deregulation of city planning are young people on the left – people like me and my colleagues at the advocacy group Renters United – who at the same time support more stringent regulation of other aspects of housing, like the property management industry. Take a deeper look, though, and it becomes clear that Wellington is in a real bind when it comes to housing. 

It’s no secret that New Zealand doesn’t have enough houses. Everyone says so, from true blues right to the deepest reds and greens. While my friends in the Green and Labour parties disagree about the other remedies needed to fix the housing crisis (while my friends on the right insist that supply is the only issue), we all agree that more housing needs to be built. Most of us also agree that new housing should be denser and more urban than the current stock. Faced with an urbanising world and a looming environmental catastrophe, this seems like a no-brainer. 

But in Wellington, as in Auckland, one of the main barriers standing in the way of getting this housing built are character protection rules. After the mass housing builds of the 1930s and 1940s, a class of newly-propertied people in the inner suburbs organised to protect their interests from outside meddling. For example in the 1960s in Highbury, a small suburb down the road from my flat in Aro Valley, locals organised and protested after Victoria University tried to buy multiple properties on the main street, Holloway Road, for a new sports field. After a lengthy battle, the council granted the entire street blanket character protection. Today the street is dotted with derelict houses, and many others are damp and unstable. Weatherboard villas built in the 1920s were not built to last a century, especially not without the extensive maintenance that Wellington’s absentee landlords have largely refused to carry out.


In this recent episode of his podcast When the Facts Change, Bernard Hickey talks to Ashok Jacob about the costs of Wellington’s inaction on housing and whether the Wellington Spatial Plan can make a difference.


I’ve lived among poor renters for long enough to know that living in a heritage rental is a generally unpleasant and often hazardous experience. But when it comes to some of the city’s loudest voices in favour of character protection, they often tend to be homeowners who lack the experience of what it’s actually like to live poor in Wellington in the 21st century. Some of those voices, like the veteran Greens in the city, come from working-class backgrounds but have since benefited from the last vestiges of the post-war consensus. Many are now homeowners, a status few from my generation will ever attain.

Last year, I spoke at the Newtown Residents Association in favour of removing character protections from the suburb. The response was vitriolic. I was 21, the youngest speaker by several decades, and the only speaker of the night supporting the proposed spatial plan. During my presentation, I was heckled several times, and one person threatened to “declare war” on those who promoted the plan. A show-of-hands survey of the mostly grey-haired audience revealed that the vast majority were homeowners and many were landlords. That’s especially significant in a suburb where renters make up almost half of the population. Because the fact is, residents’ associations aren’t representative of the community, simply because students and young workers don’t have the time or resources to organise themselves. Perhaps even more importantly, they don’t have the vested interest in the status quo – and thus, the zeal to fight their corner – that homeowners do.

Our elected members on the council are no help to us on this either. As well as being homeowners themselves, many are politically beholden to residents’ associations. In addition, council bureaucrats – by giving residents’ associations disproportionate representation in the consultation process – are leaving the rest of us out in the cold (or indoors in the cold. Either way, we’re cold). 

I’m glad that the council recently voted for radical change to our city’s housing-scape, rather than bending the knee to property owners and those with vested interests. Of course, there is still a fight ahead to ensure that new housing is accessible, affordable and of good quality, but we were always going to have to fight for that. For now, I’m glad that the misguided fears of the propertied are no longer stunting our city’s progress.

But wait there's more!