The world we live in today runs on batteries. But the lithium ion batteries that dominate the market are expensive and environmentally demanding to extract. The raw materials for lithium ion batteries are scarce and concentrated in a few geographical regions. This places continued pressure on supply chains.
It’s also insanely toxic, right? Like, disposing of it is a bit of an issue? I’m not super informed on all this but I’ve only ever read bad things about both mining it and disposing of it, though.
Mining it is also very challenging.
I remember some prof joked on their lecture, that they’ve been grilled once in EV industry after they presented the environmtal impact comparison between legacy car and EV that includes lithium mining, refinement, waste management cost and how many miles EV needs to offset such cost with its “green fuel” (spoiler: a lot). It was nearly decade ago and I don’t know their formula holds today, but it’s still plausible such negative externality being overlooked and remaining.
The nice thing about batteries is that they can be recycled almost entirely in a closed loop cycle, so eventually we’ll reach a place where new batteries aren’t mined at all, but recycled from old
Idk how far into that we are currently, however there are recycling facilities kinda all over especially for ev batteries. They can also be reused for a while for other things, like home energy storage (like in place of a whole-house generator for blackouts if you are grid-tied, or solar storage for off-grid)
We crossed over. EVs are now universally more efficient to produce and use than gas cars and it’s not close. Something less than 10,000 miles on the vehicle.
It’s actually used as a human drug for bipolar disorder.
So, not really comparable to arsenic or even lead, but also not harmless to ingest uncontrolled.