Labour ( + Greens ) creating the next major environmental disaster.
"Buyers of low-emitting cars will be able to get a rebate from July 1, 2021, while buyers of high-emitting vehicles will have to pay a fee
from January 1, 2022. The Government’s feebate scheme will apply to new and used vehicles that arrive in New Zealand. Fees and rebates
won’t be applied to sales within the domestic second-hand market.
The maximum fee will be $5175 for a new vehicle and $2875 for a used one.
The maximum rebate will be $8625 for a new vehicle and $3450 for a used one.
Rebates will be available for vehicles worth less than $80,000 that have at least a three-star safety rating."
https://www.interest.co.nz/news/1108...ts-new-feebate
"But electric cars have their own dirty little secret: Every electric vehicle, and most hybrid vehicles, rely on large lithium-ion batteries
weighing hundreds of pounds. One of the largest, the battery for the Mercedes-Benz EQC, comes in at 1,400 pounds. Typically made with cobalt,
nickel, and manganese, among other components, these batteries cost thousands of dollars and come with an environmental burden: They require
ingredients sourced from polluting mines and smelters around the world, and they can ultimately contaminate soil and water supplies if
improperly disposed.
In the rush to embrace this technology, auto companies are adopting the same pretense that has been embraced by the plastics industry:
They are claiming that used batteries will be recycled. However, the truth is being swept under the rug. None of the lithium-ion batteries in electric
vehicles are recyclable in the same sense that paper, glass, and lead car batteries are. Although efforts to improve recycling methods are
underway, generally only around half the materials in these batteries is currently extracted and repurposed. And without the most valuable
ingredients, there will be little economic incentive to invest in recycling technologies. The result, if nothing is done to tip the scales,
could be a massive health and environmental crisis."
https://www.nationalobserver.com/202...heir-batteries
"The electric-vehicle revolution, driven by the imperatives to decarbonize personal transportation in order to meet global targets for reductions
in greenhouse gas emissions and improve air quality in urban centres, is set to change the automotive industry radically. In 2017, sales of
electric vehicles exceeded one million cars per year worldwide for the first time1. Making conservative assumptions of an average battery pack
weight of 250 kg and volume of half a cubic metre, the resultant pack wastes would comprise around 250,000 tonnes and half a million cubic metres
of unprocessed pack waste, when these vehicles reach the end of their lives. Although re-use and current recycling processes can divert some of
these wastes from landfill, the cumulative burden of electric-vehicle waste is substantial given the growth trajectory of the electric-vehicle market.
This waste presents a number of serious challenges of scale; in terms of storing batteries before repurposing or final disposal, in the manual
testing and dismantling processes required for either, and in the chemical separation processes that recycling entails.
Given that the environmental footprint of manufacturing electric vehicles is heavily affected by the extraction of raw materials and production of
lithium ion batteries, the resulting waste streams will inevitably place different demands on end-of-life dismantling and recycling systems.
In the waste management hierarchy, re-use is considered preferable to recycling (Fig. 1). Because considerable value is embedded in manufactured
lithium-ion batteries (LIBs), it has been suggested that their use should be cascaded through a hierarchy of applications to optimize material use
and life-cycle impacts2. Markets for energy storage are under development as energy regulators in various locations transition to cleaner energy
sources. Energy storage is particularly sought-after in areas where weak grids require reinforcement, where high penetration of renewables requires
supply to be balanced with demand, where there is an opportunity for trading energy with the grid and in off-grid applications. Second-use battery
projects have started to develop in locations where there is regulatory and market alignment. However, large concentrations of waste—be it for
refurbishment, re-manufacture, dismantling or final disposal—can create substantial challenges. A fire in stockpiled tyres in Powys, Wales, for
example, smouldered for fifteen years from 1989 to 2004. Since the electrode materials in LIBs are far more reactive than tyre rubber3, without a
proactive and economically sound waste-management strategy for LIBs there are potentially greater dangers associated with stockpiling of end-of-life
LIBs. Already the number of fires being reported in metal-recovery facilities is increasing4, owing to the illicit or accidental concealment of
(consumer) LIBs in the guise of, for example, lead–acid batteries. Among examples of recent major fires are those that took place in metal-recovery
facilities in Shoreway, San Carlos, USA, in September 20165, Guernsey in August 2018 and Tacoma, Washington, USA, in September 2018."
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1682-5
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021...dead-batteries
"There are two main ways to deactivate lithium-ion batteries. The most common technique, called pyrometallurgy, involves burning them to remove unwanted
organic materials and plastics. This method leaves the recycler with just a fraction of the original material—typically just the copper from current
collectors and nickel or cobalt from the cathode. A common pyro method, called smelting, uses a furnace powered with fossil fuels, which isn’t great
for the environment, and it loses a lot of aluminum and lithium in the process. But it is simple, and smelting factories that currently exist to process
ore from the mining industry are already able to handle batteries. Of the small fraction of lithium-ion batteries that are recycled in the US—just 5
percent of all spent cells—most of them end up in a smelting furnace.
The other approach is called hydrometallurgy. A common form of this technique, called leaching, involves soaking lithium-ion cells in strong acids to
dissolve the metals into a solution. More materials, including lithium, can be recovered this way. But leaching comes with its own challenges. Recyclers
must preprocess the cells to remove unwanted plastic casings and drain the charge on the battery, which increases cost and complexity. It’s part of the
reason why spent lithium-ion batteries have been treated as waste ever since the first commercial cells hit the market in the early 1990s. It was often
several times cheaper to mine new material, especially lithium, than recover it with leaching."
https://www.wired.com/story/the-race-to-crack-battery-recycling-before-its-too-late/
